


Incompatibility

by Rikku



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies), Pacific Rim: Uprising
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Disordered Eating, Dysphoria, M/M, Self-harm (coerced)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-07 06:48:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14075292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rikku/pseuds/Rikku
Summary: (spoilers for Uprising)“Hey hey heyyy. Hermann, right? Newt’s not here right now. Can I take a message?”Newt’s mind is corrupted. Hermann will do everything he can to help the people he cares about, because that’s what humans do.





	1. Chapter 1

“Hello, Newton.”

Newt opened his eyes. Only two of them.

Jake Pentecost was the only one who’d been in to talk to him in a long time. A long long time. Conservatively he estimated two weeks. At his outside estimate, five years. Newt wasn’t as skilled at monitoring his own thoughts as he once had been and the passage of time didn’t seem that important. His nerves tingled, blue wire crackling with currents, and he flared out his fingertips. 

Any change was important. Anything that meant he could learn their plans or, optimistically, finally proceed with Plan B.

Jake Pentecost, standing there calmly, looking like a big man in his leather jacket. And next to him, Hermann, hands anxious around the handle of his cane, eyes weighing on him like regrets Newt didn’t have time for. Words hanging between them.

Newt remembered how to speak after a minute. It had been a while. Somewhere between a week and two years. “Hey,” he said. It came out sounding small. He would kick himself, if he wasn’t tied to this chair. He rolled his head back and grinned at his old lab partner, bright and joyously deranged. “Hey hey heyyy. Hermann, right? Newt’s not here right now. Can I take a message?”

Hermann’s cane shifted against the floor, a familiar scrape. Jake rolled his eyes sideways to the scientist, conspiratorial. “I told you,” he said.

“You did,” Hermann said, testy as ever. He took a step forward, no further, and Jake Pentecost still sharpened, shoulders tensing, ready to interfere. As if there was any risk Hermann was going to break Newt out. Well, now, well, now, maybe this could work out.

Because Hermann looked at him like he was a person. No, Hermann stared at him out of those big brown eyes – on him the archaic _two eyes_ was nearly charming – like he was a puppy someone had left out in the rain. Newt tried to ease back the grin, to look more pitiable, but it was hard, very hard, his body didn’t always listen to him.

Hermann leaned forward, stretching his body just a little further into the gaping space between them. “Newt,” he said, fiercely. “I know you’re in there.”

_I’m not_ , Newt wanted to yell at him, _I’m really really not_. But he was. He was simply a lot more than just Newt. He was so much better.

The blue fire in his veins seared through him, and he could picture it branching out through his nervous system, burning out the weaknesses. He closed his eyes, just for a moment, just for a respite, and for that moment he was home. Screams echoing in his mind in the shifting colours of the Precursor plane, so much better than a nightmare. 

Newt opened his eyes again to see that Hermann had stepped closer, that Jake hadn’t stopped him. “Hey, man,” Newt said quietly. “It’s real good to see you.”

Hermann’s smile stretched across his face. Newt always liked how it did that. At the same time repulsion twisted in him, tightened his fleshy human gut. Apes, pulling their skin back from their teeth. Weak silly things growing lazy on oxygen. Newt let out a breath, tried not to think about the repulsive act of breathing, tried not to let the hate show on his face.

“Sorry I couldn’t get in sooner,” Hermann said. He looked like he wanted to lean forward closer still. As though Newt wasn’t an enemy, and a human besides, with natural weapons of hard nails and teeth. Hands to clench tight. “Mister Pentecost wouldn’t let me in.” He paused. “Understandably,” he said, looking uncomfortable. “But I’m here now.”

Newt rolled his eyes towards Jake, standing stoic behind Hermann like he wasn’t a dropout or whatever his deal was. “Ugh!” Newt said loudly. “Call him Jake, Mister Pentecost is his dad!” He grinned. “Sorry, _was_ , right? Gotta say, I figured you’d be one of the frontline casualties in Apocalypse Two, a martyr like your pops. Did I say that already?”

Hermann, who had no control at all over his fleshy face, tried and failed not to look appalled. Jake’s face was smooth, calm. “Eight times,” he said after a moment. “Amara’s making me keep track,” he added, to Hermann. “If it gets to ten I have to make her pancakes.”

“Huh,” Newt said and let his head lean back against the cold metal. He didn’t remember. Maybe saying that would help. “I forgot,” he said. “When do I get pancakes?”

Jake, still facing him, slid his eyes to Hermann. “That a thing that’s gonna help?” he said. He sounded a little doubtful. “Food?” His eyes settled on Newt, considering. 

Hermann shook his head. Damn him. Newt glared at him, but Hermann didn’t seem to notice. “He doesn’t eat enough,” Hermann said, like he wasn’t a walking stick insect. 

They had shared so many hurried meals, instant ramen boiled in the lab equipment, sandwiches split hurriedly amongst the blood and gore. _Hey, Pentecost Junior, could I get a guts sandwich?_

“You know I want what’s in your head,” Jake said, and only by the power of the cold burning blue lying underneath Newt’s everything was Newt able not to flinch at that. Jake shrugged. “You can get pancakes, if you want. You’re a prisoner of war, technically.”

Newt laughed, but his laugh wasn’t right. He knew it wasn’t. His tongue was too big, it got in the way. His laugh sounded strangled and gulping and broken. Hermann took a step back, even. Newt snapped his mouth shut, breathed in through his nose, waited till he’d calmed down. “There are conventions for that,” Newt said carefully. “Pretty sure there’s something about fresh air and no solitary confinement, right? This isn’t humane. By prisoner of war standards.” The hysteria threatened to bubble up into him, out through his mouth as a grin, through his fingers and hands and all his bound body: as though he cared what was _humane_.

“Not sure you qualify,” Jake said, like he’d read his mind. “Are you human?”

Yes.

No, no, no, no.

Newt’s silence stretched out, and he opened his mouth and closed it, said nothing at all.

“In every way that counts,” Hermann said firmly. He glared at Jake. Newt grinned, and the grin felt nearly familiar. Oh, he knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of that glare. “He’s right that this is no way to treat someone.”

“You know why,” Jake said.

And Hermann didn’t fight for him, didn’t show his all-too-human weakness, just sighed, and said, “I know why.”

Newt closed his mouth tighter, slumped his shoulders. So Hermann wasn’t going to fight for him, to insist tooth and nail that Newt could one day be trusted. He would’ve been completely wrong, of course, but it would’ve been nice.

Jake put a hand on Hermann’s shoulder, then removed it. Oddly for Hermann, he didn’t flinch away from the contact.

Maybe he was getting better. Had there been a hug, somewhere on the mad rush to the top floor of his Plan A? He thought he remembered that. So Hermann would hug him, but wouldn’t break him out of his deserved captivity to usher in the end of the human race. Typical.

“There are special circumstances, Newt,” Hermann said. It was weird to hear him sound this gentle. He stepped closer, eager. “We need to be careful, but if you cooperate, if you lend your aid … You couldn’t get into any position of influence again, but – books at least. To read. Maybe a better place to stay. I could stay with you.” 

Hermann was practically humming with that urgent desire to connect Newt had wasted so many years not recognising. Eyes fixed on Newt’s. Leaning in. Just a little closer and he could kill him--

Newt caught the thought as it went past, and clenched his hands on it. Why? Why? _No. No._

_Your objective. To bring this world into destruction. Into beauty. Your purpose, our purpose._

_Yes, of course, yeah, so killing Hermann makes sense if he’s getting in the way, but he’s not. He might get me out._

The voices were sceptical, humming in his head. They didn’t use language exactly. It felt mostly like screams. Human talking was the thing that sounded strange to him, now, but he never had talked how people wanted, always too fast, too far, too much.

_He might get us out_ , Newt sent fierce as claws cling to flesh.

His mind rumbled back into silence, just for a moment. 

Hermann stared at him, clearly waiting for something. _Newton isn’t here right now_. He wanted to remember Hermann’s arms warm and too tight around him, but instead he could not think of anything but his hands around Hermann’s neck. He clenched his hands on the chair, tight, tight.

“You want me to help?” Newt burbled. Anything, say anything. “Sure. Course I’ll help.”

Hermann leaned back, thank goodness, damn everything. He blinked, and adjusted his glasses. Jake Pentecost crossed his arms over his chest, examining the wall like he hadn’t seen it already a dozen times. “You will?”

“Of course,” Newt said, leaning forward. “He wants to help!” He only realised his mistake from how Jake shifted back half a step, nowhere near as stoic as his father. Hermann himself did not move. Not an inch. “ _I_ ,” Newt corrected quickly. “I want to help. Of course. Wait, wait, let me help!”

But Jake had his arm on Hermann’s shoulder, ushering him out, and desperation was thick as mucus in his throat, and his words sounded garbled. Wrong. Not human at all. Nowhere near convincing. 

And Hermann was leaving, his best strained hope of getting free walking stiffly out the door like his leg pained him, like many things pained him, Jake half between him and Newt’s chair like Newt was a threat to him, and he was.

“Let me kill the world already!” Newt yelled after them, and then he started laughing, laughing high and shrill, and it was some time before he remembered how to stop.

 

 

 

Newton’s laughter rolled through the air, even in this cramped little room on the other side of the one-way glass. “Huh,” the woman Jules said after a few moments. “Doesn’t sound like he’s going to get you that intel on the kaiju homeworld.”

Hermann wanted to tell her it was the Precursor world, but his heart wasn’t in it. His heart was on the other side of black mirrored glass, strapped to a chair, laughing and laughing and pale as milk. “Could’ve been more productive,” Jake said.

Hermann grunted. He shifted his fingers on his cane. His hands were still sweaty, and he sincerely hoped Newton hadn’t noticed. On a dubious bright side, Newton in his present state didn’t seem likely to notice much of anything. “Not everything can work first try,” he said. He was aware he’d snapped it too sharply from how Jules looked at him, not condemning but thoughtful. He cleared his throat, shifted, stared out at Newt through the glass. At least he’d stopped laughing. “Thank you. For letting me try.”

Jake nodded, and for an awful moment Hermann was afraid he’d put a hand on his shoulder again. “We got your go-ahead?” he said.

“You don’t need it,” Hermann said. “I thought you were the Marshall now.”

Jake grimaced just a little. “You helped save the world,” he said, gently for Jake. “Twice, Gottlieb. You get a say.”

If he got a say, Newt would be out and free right now … but no. In this case, doing right by Newt meant leaving him trapped here and tied up. Not giving him the least chance to cause more death or Breaches. The Newt he’d known would never have been able to live with his current self’s atrocities. He thought.

“Go ahead,” he forced out, and almost wished he didn’t get a say. At least then he wouldn’t be complicit.

But this way he got to be in the room, as they decided, got to be in here, staring out, as they went in to poor bound traitorous Newton with those awful devices. Hermann got to be here watching, as Jake strode into the room and took up a post in one corner, thumbs in his pockets, as his inferior scientist followed him – no one, no one held a candle to the two of them – carting along the portable Pons interface. The neural spike. He had been assured it would cause no permanent damage.

Whatever he’d told Pentecost, Hermann wasn’t sure there was anything left of Newt but damage. Nothing under the scar tissue but more scar. And they were going to put that thing in his head, and dig around in it.

He tapped his fingers impatiently against his leg, and paced a short circuit of the room, shoulders up nearly to his ears, mouth stretched in a grimace.

It was for the world. For Earth and all its people. They had to know what lay in the Precursor dimension to mount an offence there.

Newt’s eyes went huge the second he saw the device, and he scrabbled back in his chair, pushing himself back in it as far as he could go. His fingers dug at the arms. “I thought you were asking nicely?” he said. “This isn’t nicely, this isn’t nicely! I said I would help!”

Hermann couldn’t hear what Jake said, but it was something quiet, something final, something that made Newt’s face look like he’d slapped him. Jake waved the machine on.

“You can trust me,” Newt babbled. “Or anyway it’s worth a shot, isn’t it? You don’t have to … you don’t …” He leaned his head back, straining against the chair. The Pons interface, deceptively familiar. The neural spike, in case that failed. Not approved for use on humans. 

Jake’s face was expressionless, but his hands were clasped tight behind his back, and he was not normally a man for parade rest.

The device wheeled closer. Newt shook his head, his whole body shook. “No,” he said and then his eyes rolled towards the glass. “Hermann, _Hermann_ – Hermann don’t let them do this to me, Hermann, stop it, no, please, _Hermann_!”

And he could not be complicit in this for another millisecond more.

Hermann was barely even aware of charging through the door into the corridor. He pushed hurriedly past the young lab assistant, and got in front of the device, extending his cane so he formed a barricade between that neural spike and Newt. Putting his back to Newt didn’t matter in that moment. It didn’t matter at all.

“Stop,” Hermann barked, with every bit of authority he could pretend to have. “Stop!”

Jake Pentecost’s hands dropped loose to his sides.

The lab assistant looked uncertainly between Pentecost and Hermann, and then tugged the device back a few steps; one wheel squeaked. Jake waved a hand, looking tired, and the assistant pulled the device out the door.

Hermann heard Newt let out a breath. He was glad to hear him make a reaction, and afraid. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck like a predator was behind him.

He turned around. Newt, now, was lazing against his bonds, like he chose to be there, like he hadn’t been cringing in terror just a moment before. Hermann for once didn’t want to look at him. Not at his too-thin face or bloodshot eyes, and not his sly, lazy grin.

“Too easy!” Newt crowed. At least being mocked by him was familiar. He grinned at Hermann. “Oh, you make it too easy.”

Hermann turned and walked briskly out.

Jake followed him out, and closed the door, and punched in the combination, and then the other combination. Maybe it was for the best to leave Newt alone in there. Maybe that was what he should have done.

They would have dug into his mind, either way. Humans and Precursors, both wanted to use Newt's mind.

Pentecost’s hand on his shoulder was gentler than he deserved. Hermann shrugged it off irritably. “What the hell was that?” Jake said amicably.

Hermann shook his head, and walked an agitated few steps down the corridor. He didn’t want Newton to hear them.

“I can get the information out,” he said, once they were away. Jake stopped, and crossed his arms, and lifted his eyebrows skeptically. Hermann insisted, “I can. Let me try.”  
Jake shook his head slowly, and lifted his finger, then flicked it down. “You had a try.”

Hermann gritted his teeth. He really wished he could convince anyone, anyone at all that the first experiment was never meant to be the last one. “I’ll try harder,” he said. “More ruthless. You know I can be ruthless, I’m a mathematician, for God’s sake!”

“Uh-huh,” Jake said slowly.

“I can do it,” Hermann said. Before two weeks ago, nothing had felt this urgent in a long time. Nothing quite had that rush. It wasn’t like he’d missed it. Perhaps he had missed it. “I know we need what’s in his mind, but destroying it won’t help. I can do get what you need.” It was impossible, but Hermann had learned to disregard that word. Newt had taught him. “We worked together. Saved the world together. He trusts me.”

“Didn’t he try to choke you to death?” Jake said. 

Hermann lifted a hand to his throat, then dropped it, with a sniff. “Tried,” Hermann said. “He successfully killed rather more people than that.” 

He didn’t want to think about that. He couldn’t help but think of it, ran the numbers when he couldn’t sleep, sat up staring with chalk dust on his fingers until daybreak. Newt had caused that tally of casualties. There was no arguing. He had.

“Okay,” Jake Penetecost said.

“And furthermore, as someone who drifted with the man once I …” Hermann said, and then stopped. “Oh,” he said, and rallied. “I’m glad you can see reason.”

Jake just nodded. Hermann had an odd feeling that he’d been manipulated into this position. But that wouldn’t make sense, when he was already determined to help. Jake Pentecost wasn’t really the scheming type.

Maybe no one was who he thought they were.

“You have my full permission, within reason. Anything that helps,” Jake said. “Take as much time as you need. We need to prepare anyway.” He paused. “Gottlieb, I don’t gotta tell you …”

Hermann pressed his lips together. “I won’t tell him anything of our plans,” he said. “Don’t worry. I know he’s …” He paused. “A, ah, two-way street, as it were.” 

Jake nodded silently. “Do your best in there,” he said. “Doc? Good luck.”

Hermann felt emotions threaten to stir in him, contemplated quashing them, then remembered he was trying not to do that, so much. Overcome with feeling, he clapped Jake lightly on the shoulder as he passed. Jake smiled at him.

He stopped outside the door to Newt’s prison, just for a moment, to brace himself. But it was longer than a moment. He found himself counting his breaths, an old, bad habit. Ten, fifteen, twenty. Thirty-five. Seventy. At eighty-five he finally had enough courage to unlock the door, and walked in. He wasn’t going to fool himself that Pentecost didn’t have people stationed in the observation room, but for all appearances it was just him, and Newt.

Newt looked small and scrunched and vulnerable as a sheep’s knuckle in a little plastic baggie. Of course it was thanks to Newt that he knew what that looked like.

He had to act as though there was nothing to be worried about. There was everything to be worried about, and that was comforting. On a certain level, nothing and everything were one and the same. 

“Hello, again,” Hermann said. “Newton.”

“You came back,” Newt said slowly, and he grinned.

Hermann walked another step in and stopped. He’d need to ask if he could bring his own chair in. Standing up for long periods was something to avoid if he could. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good,” Newt said, and leaned forward, like they were co-conspirators. He didn’t whisper, instead nearly shouted it. “I don’t think I am either!”

“Next time I’ll bring a book,” Hermann said.

“Bring me a scalpel,” Newt said. He scraped one fingernail at the chair. His fingernails were filthy. Probably wrist-deep in kaiju like always.

Hermann very deliberately did not look towards the one-way window. “No, Newton.”

Newt sighed, and drooped against his bonds, lounging back. Had they let him out at all, this whole time? Even just while tranquilized? He would grow chafed, ill. Hermann’s mind added up possible consequences: bedsores right up to muscular atrophy. “You never were any fun,” Newt said, interrupting his list of maladies.

“You’ll notice I’m not the one tied to a chair!”

He regretted it the second he said it, but it made Newt laugh. A real laugh, it seemed like. A human one. Hermann’s breath caught.

“We have fun,” Newt said. And Hermann wished he wasn’t afraid to ask which ‘we’ he meant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> everyone in the World is gonna want to write a fix-it fic for that film, and here is mine


	2. Chapter 2

Hermann pulled his stool into the room, and set it down close to Newton but not too close, and sat with the book across his lap. Newton watched him the whole time. 

Newt’s eyes weren’t blown red with blood like he’d seen them sometimes, but they still weren’t quite his. Maybe that was a comforting lie Hermann told himself. Maybe it was all him.

“I thought you might enjoy one of the latest scientific journals,” Hermann said. He smiled. “A little taste of the outside world.”

The air in here felt old and stale. “Hermann,” Newt said, dragging his words out like he was unspeakably tired, or Hermann unspeakably stupid. “You know the only thing I care about is k-science, the Breach. You and him both know he won’t be allowed within a square mile of those materials. So spare me the journals.”

Hermann could get used to him speaking in the third person, no doubt. It honestly wasn’t the oddest thing Newt had done, and that was counting from far before Newt let kaiju into his brain and they did what kaiju did and rampaged. “Yes?” Hermann said, and smoothed out the pages carefully. He hooked his glasses over his face and peered down at the page. “So you aren’t interested in – observations on rapid mutation in fauna located in areas of mass kaiju contamination?”

He gave him a moment, glanced up. Smiled again, more easily, at how Newt’s eyes were fixed on the book. A hunger that was familiar, and human.

“Maybe,” Newt said. He looked away. “If you feel like reading aloud like a weirdo.”

Hermann cleared his throat and started on the introduction. The material didn’t really interest him, it was far too speculative, but there were worse things to do than read to a colleague. It held Newt’s interest for a while, at least.

Two pages into the introduction he became restless, twisting against his bonds, and a paragraph later interrupted him. “You printed all this on paper?” Newt said. “Way to kill the trees, Hermann.”

Newt never had let him get a word in edgewise. Hermann smoothed his thumb over the last paragraph to mark it in his mind, and looked up. “You know how I feel about tactility.”

Newt’s gaze was soft and fond. “I do.”

Hermann looked down at the book again, fidgeting with it. Just to make sure he had the paragraph right.

“Maybe we should make them draw a line in here,” Newt said, and flared his fingers a little. Like the remark would be accompanied by a jab with his elbow, if they could touch. “I don’t want your gross chalk dust getting all up in my sinuses.”

Hermann harrumphed, and folded the book shut. “I won’t be doing my research here, rest assured.” And Newt fell silent at once, which he had not meant to happen. Hermann shifted, settled the book carefully into his bag. “Shall I read you the first chapter next time? I read ahead. There are some … interesting conclusions.” Farfetched, but he would’ve enjoyed debating them with Newton, in the life he could’ve had.

Newt stared ahead, looking not at Hermann but at the door, his only possible exit route. “If you have to,” Newt said. “I really don’t know what you think you’re doing here.”

Hermann ignored him. “What can I get you?” he said, smoothing his hands over his thighs. The old familiar ache. “To make you more comfortable?”

Without looking at him, Newt said, “Get me out of this chair.” Flat and cold.

Hermann shook his head, forced a smile onto his face. It didn’t belong there. Invasive species. “Maybe I can get you a better chair,” he offered.

Newt’s gaze flicked towards him, resting somewhere on his hairline. “A cage is still a cage is still a cage.”

Hermann nodded, without saying anything. What was there to say? He didn’t want to leave, quite yet. He sat. Newt sat. In another world this would’ve been companionable.

Newton started, and Hermann looked at him. “Yeah, actually, uh, yeah,” Newt said, and shook his head, like he was clearing it. He seemed more himself, more the man Hermann knew. Right down to the coaxing little grin he gave him, too frenzied to be charming. “Think you could bring me Alice?”

Hermann sat quite blankly. He hadn’t planned for this. Perhaps he should have. “Your … girlfriend,” he said.

Newt stared at him. “Oh,” he said, like he was coming from somewhere miles away, and then he laughed. “Haha. No, you’ve met, actually.”

“I’d remember,” Hermann said, firmly.

Newt’s watery eyes fixed on him. “We’ve all met,” Newt said, significantly.

Newt’s eyes flicked to his temples, then back. Hermann stared at him, and pulled his jacket closer around his shoulders. The unrelenting apocalypse hours of ten years ago. Newt with blood on his face, Newt grinning at him through the Pons helmet, later. The wild unrelenting rush.

“Tell me,” Hermann said, very slowly. “Tell me you didn’t keep the piece of kaiju brain you drifted with like an idiot—!” He shouldn’t shout at a sick man, but his voice rose all the same.

Newt pressed against his bonds, trying to get closer to him. “C’mon, man. You have to have fond memories.” His eyes were bright, a shadow of the ferocious energy he’d shown then.

No wonder. No wonder they had been able to corrupt him. Control him. No wonder, if he’d been doing this.

And Hermann half a world away.

“I still have nightmares,” Hermann said. His voice cracked and he swallowed, spoke more evenly. “I told you.”

“Yeah?” Newt said, watching him. Hermann just shook his head, tight-lipped, and Newt sagged back slowly. “I thought we shared something.” He sounded tired, the energy gone from him.

“We certainly did,” Hermann snapped, because he did not feel right now like dwelling nostalgically on their connection. “Trauma!”

Newt shook his head, eyes still on him. These days, Hermann couldn’t quite get it out of his head that Newt looked at him the way kaiju looked at cities that were in their way. “They got into me then, you know that,” Newt said. He grinned a bit. “My first time with Alice. But … Hermann. Herms. Doctor Hermann Gottlieb.”

“Yes?” Hermann said, tiredly. He leaned back on the stool. “If you’re going to address me by title, you may as well throw the PHDs in.” He was more thrown than he could find words for that Newt seemed to have to search to remember his name.

Newt’s eyes were fixed on him. Speculative. “You know the drift,” he said. “A piece of that must’ve got from me to you. Just a piece.”

Hermann smoothed a hand restlessly over his thigh. “I’ll tell you if I get any sudden urges to destroy all life on our planet.”

“Do,” Newt said, earnestly. His smile was boyish and shy. “You know, I really would love to work together again?”

Hermann gritted his teeth and stood up. “We could’ve worked together on, on thrusters, on physics,” he said. “Not on ending the world.”

“Hey,” Newt said, and turned his hands palm-up with fingers spread out, his equivalent of a shrug. “Fifty percent of a working relationship is compromise.”

“I will do what I can for you,” Hermann said, instead of a proper answer, and went to the door. He lingered there, and realized he was waiting. Waiting for Newt to shout after him that the author of the paper was wrong, that it was not in avian evolution but invertebrate that the real changes in morphology could be seen, or something very Newton like that. 

He did not. Of course he did not. 

Hermann swallowed to ease the ache in his throat and rapped briskly out of the prison chamber.

Newt wasn’t right, couldn’t be. Surely Hermann would know if he were another sleeper agent. He had gotten only a hint of the unspeakably alien nature of kaiju, and Newt had drifted with the brain alone, and then by its influence been driven to again, and again, and again, if Hermann was any judge of what he’d said, injecting kaiju right into his brain. 

Trauma, not just once but over and over again, building scar tissue, building him into something unspeakable. Logically, there was no hope at all for him.

He had seemed excited, for a moment. About the birds.

 

 

 

Holy motherfucking shitballs Hermann actually came back. Newt was a genius. A genius at using friendship. He’d be out of here in no time.

He started awake as Hermann entered, and then shifted in his seat, feeling odd. He frowned down at his arm. Someone had pulled back his sleeve, and tucked tubes snugly into the skin of his inner elbow. Oh he didn’t like the look of that. Only kaiju were meant to be there, crawling over his skin. He strained back, trying to pull free.

“I have it,” Hermann said quickly, and dropped his book in his hurry as he strode forward. He didn’t disconnect the tubes, just rolled Newt’s sleeves back down over them, and reeled back away from him in a hurry. He always had been a smart man.

Newt scowled down at the tubes, and he could still feel them, there where only his ink was meant to be, but the urge to rip them out was lessened now. “Thanks,” Newt said. He wasn’t sure he was thankful. “They were drugging me?”

Hermann shook his head. But that denial did not seem likely. Newt knew better than to take anything as true.

“Do you know what with?” Newt pressed. “Like, maybe I’m allergic.” His skin felt stretched hot and tight over his body, but that was just how skin was. Thin dermal layers over a bag of red blood and meat and soupbones.

“They aren’t drugging you,” Hermann said, then gave an obvious glance to the opaque wall that probably hid some kind of observation screen. “That I’m aware of. That was food. You must have been too close to waking up for them to risk removing them immediately.”

He didn’t want them pumping things into him. Could’ve been worse, he had expected worse. Could’ve been better. “Living large,” Newt said loudly. “Living the live intravenous. Hey, Hermann, do they feed _you_ with tubes?”

Hermann looked at least a little ashamed, but met his eyes steadily, all the same. His mouth twitched up. “At this base? I almost wish they did. There’s whipped cream, and pasta sauce. And then, after that, there is more pasta sauce.”

Commiserating over PPDC food was something he didn’t know he’d missed. “So I’m at the base,” Newt said and grinned at him. “Thanks, Herms,” and he meant it this time.

Hermann bent slowly to pick his book up, and settled down on his stool, saying nothing.

Newt rolled his shoulders, trying to get out some of the aches building there. He should be more careful. Or at least be careless in more productive directions. They didn’t have any common ground, but it was good that Hermann thought they did. “It’s good to see you again,” he tried.

Hermann’s mouth twitched up, and he looked sincerely pleased. Newt’s chest felt lighter at the sight. Maybe he’d fixed the damage he made with his earlier remark, and Hermann could, what, smuggle him out in his bookbag? Newt laughed.

“You say that each time,” Hermann said, and Newt stopped laughing.

He wanted to ask how many visits it had been. It was so hard to keep track of the passage of time, when everything was so slippery. His mind skidded out of his grasp like soap in the shower. That was fine. It wasn’t meant to be in his grasp. All was as it should be. He was doing just dandy.

“Do you want me to start on the first chapter?” Hermann said, tongue sticking out, just a little, as he found his place. 

“No,” Newt said. This didn’t feel like time, yet, but impatience roared underneath the surface of his skin. Like mouths opening underneath, mouths of creatures with no need to eat, with no purpose but the ravening. _Get out of here. Plan B._ “Hermann. Get me out of here.”

Hermann turned a page, like he hadn’t said anything. “If you want I could skip to the diagrams. I know you’ll laugh at the cladogram.” He looked up at Newt and forced a smile. “You always loved a good cladogram.”

Newt strained hard against his bonds, until they cut against his skin as he leaned forward in his urgency. As though he could escape as though they could escape as though he could burst free of himself and bring his boiling blood right to Mount Fuji. “I need to get out,” he said. His voice came out scraped and desperate. “Please, you have to help me get out! I know I messed up, they got into my head, but Hermann, please. Please. I’m going to die in here.”

Hermann finally closed the book, and raised his eyebrows at him. “Hopefully not soon,” he said.

“Don’t you care about him at all?” Newt said, and he truly snarled it, voices that weren’t his own tearing out of his throat. Hermann blinked a little, and adjusted his glasses.

“Interesting,” he said.

“Right,” Newt said, and his voice was just his own again, and he felt relief and he felt loss. He leaned back and closed his eyes. The Precursor plane welcomed him blazing blue electric. “Right, I get it,” he said, thinking aloud. Good thing he liked the sound of his voice. “You’re not here as a friend or whatever. Like that could ever be enough to make you put up with me, when you’ve never been able to put up with Newt, let alone Newt and friends.” He opened his eyes to shake his head at Hermann, who was staring at him. “I’ve got your game, Hermann. I know why you’re here.”

“Do you,” Hermann said.

“I’m your test subject,” Newt said. He meant to fling it in his face. He meant to break Hermann’s heart with the accusation. But it just came out matter-of-fact.

Hermann looked a little ill, and shook his head. “No, Newton.”

Newt gave him a tired smile. “Ever the K-scientist, huh?” He closed his eyes on Hermann. Behind his eyelids he saw just the human range of blacks and blood-blues, another disappointment. “I guess someone had to pick up my slack. No offence, Hermann, and no hard feelings, but I really hope they don’t allocate you much funding to study me.”

A strained and pained silence. Newt smirked a little, waiting, because it was always kinda funny when Hermann tried to lie.

There was a touch, and Newt jerked his eyes open. “Newton,” Hermann said. “I am here as your friend.” 

And Hermann stood close to him, his long fingers wrapped awkwardly around Newt’s hand, fingertips brushing against the manacle at his wrist. His touch was mammalian-warm, infinitely grounding.

Newt swallowed. Hermann squeezed his hand, urgent. It really wasn’t smart of him to get this close, but Newt couldn’t put together any escape plans right now. His mind was too full for anything else to fit.

Hermann let go, and moved back to his seat, and only then did Newt remember you were meant to squeeze people’s hands back. “Fuck,” he said. Hermann looked at him in vague disapproval.

Newt cocked his head right back. His hand felt cold, now, where Hermann’s hand had been. Many things lost. Many things still to be lost. He would sacrifice everything. “If you were really my friend,” Newt said, “you’d get me out of here.”

Hermann looked away and down from him, smiling a very little. He rubbed at his thigh where it always hurt in the cold. “I’m treating you approximately as an addict,” Hermann informed him, nearly calmly, and opened the book. “Shall I merely read the good parts?”

“I’m not--Sure,” Newt spluttered. “Sure, here’s me in the corner snorting—kaiju—Hermann, that’s really not accurate. I hate when you’re inaccurate!”

“I’m sure you can break the connection any time you want,” Hermann agreed. And then looked up at him, and maybe it wasn’t a joke at all. From the way he was looking at him. Maybe Hermann really believed he could be freed.

It made Newt feel sick, tired, or maybe that was whatever the PPDC were giving him, or maybe it was ten years’ of drift bleed and the too-tight suit of his own humanity. “Of course we can,” he said. He corrected himself. “I mean of course he can’t. Of course I can. I … Hermann,” and he was pleading, now, and he didn’t know what for. “Hermann, there’s just so many of us in here. There’s so many. They’re in my head and there’s no room for me, my head just isn’t big enough.” He wrested back control of his emotions and laughed a little. “I’m sure that’s hilarious to you.”

“Not really,” Hermann said. He sat there quietly. He turned a page of the book, then looked up at Newt. “Alright, it is, a little.”

Newt felt a grin stretch across his face, pushing into his cheeks. “It’s what I deserve, right? This is probably the right end for me. Burn the world or go down in flames.” His mouth hurt. Everything hurt, really, but he was trying not to be enough in his body to notice. “My name is Legion because we’re multitudes. Is that how it goes? I’m _fucking_ Legion, man.”

“That sounds unpleasant for you,” Hermann said, with all his usual gift for devastating understatement, the bastard. He turned another page of his book. Newt did not think for a minute he was actually reading that. “Newton,” he said abruptly, “can I bring you your medications?”

Newt blinked his eyes at him. “I don’t take those,” he said. They had drifted together. Worked together for long aching frantic years before that, at each other’s throats, in each other’s hair. Maybe it hurt that Hermann didn’t remember. Maybe he needed to be further away. “You know I never took those.”

“I know,” Hermann said, wryly and emphatically. Newt relaxed a little. He tried to crane to catch the title of the book, then stopped himself when he remembered he wasn’t meant to care. 

_Any change,_ he told the roaring urgency in his mind. _Any change is worth noting, right? Might be the thing that catalysts us the fuck out of here._

Hermann said, hesitantly, “Perhaps you should consider it.”

Newt stared at him. This hadn’t actually had this conversation before, never crossed that particular line during their bickering years, his golden years. “Sure,” he said. It seemed barely relevant now. “Sure. Do they do mood stabilizers for kaiju influence now?” He made sure his voice bit. “Cognitive behavioral therapy for half your mind being in another dimension?”

“They could,” Hermann said. Newt huffed in annoyance at him, and Hermann shrugged. “K-science is growing all the time.”

Another little pang of distant hurt. He should be there, yelling at the new recruits, spreading his stuff everywhere, playing the right kind of music. Saving the world. Destroying the world.

Hermann leaned forward. He probably meant to engage his trust when he did that, but it was just weird. Hermann never used to be one for physical proximity. “I’m sure I could bring in a therapist,” he said. He winced elegantly. “Not my therapist, of course, but some other one.”

“Oh, you’re getting therapy?” Newt crooned. He tapped his fingertips against the chair. “Poor sweet Hermann.”

That would’ve got him yelled at, before Hermann’s weird peaceful thing he was doing now. “It is a wise course, in the times we live in,” Hermann said, looking at him soberly. So much soulful staring, like there was even a hint of soul left in Newt to find. _Boil me down and reduce me to essence, and you’ll find an awful lot of iron and carbon, and no hint of a soul, Doctor Gottlieb._ Hermann being this vulnerable made him ashamed of how much he itched and urged to jab into the wounds.

“Heh,” Newt jeered, “still.”

Hermann’s fingers ghosted at his neck, above that ridiculous jacket collar. He said, “My best friend tried to kill me.”

Newt was nowhere near far enough away for that not to hurt.

His skin was too small for him. His mind was much too big. Too much mass, one of these days, it’d implode in and he’d be destroyed and destroy the universe with him, or had that happened already?

Hermann didn’t even look angry at him. That was the worst part. Newt said, “I mean, he did a lot of things,” and did his best attempt at a charming smile, which felt wrong. Too sideways. “It’s not like it was personal.”

“I know,” Hermann said gravely. “Or I hoped so.” Then his mouth twitched up. “I was indeed working under the theory that your assault of me was merely incidental, not the – the point of your enterprise. Newton. I’d be rather more alarmed right now if you’d done all you did, trying to destroy the world, merely for your personal vendetta against _me_.” 

So they weren’t trying to pretend he hadn’t done it. He wasn’t sure which way he wanted it. There was no good way.

Newt leaned forward and looked into his eyes. “Hey, I mean, don’t underestimate yourself, Hermann,” he said. “You’re a really annoying guy.”

Hermann’s mouth twitched up higher. He laughed, just a tiny bit. It sounded like a croak. “The sentiment is returned,” he said. 

It felt warm. Safe. Just the two of them, and them, and them, and them. 

He had made it sound so effortlessly ridiculous. And it was, of course. Newt would never hurt Hermann. And Newt had already hurt Hermann, badly. He would hurt him again if he had the chance. He would do so much worse than that. He was so much worse than that.

Still. This was nice. 

“Herms, old bean. Old fruit. Old man. Oldest man,” Newt said. Hermann lifted his eyes tiredly to him like the sheer effort of looking at him was a thing that he needed to brace for, which made Newt grin. “Are they going to let me have Alice? I don’t need to drift with her,” he did, he really did, “I’d just like to have her around. You know. To look at.”

Hermann was silent for a long time. 

This room was cold. Newt hadn’t noticed the room was cold before. He curled his fingers nervously. “Uh. Did something happen to Alice?”

Hermann said, “It has been destroyed.”

“No,” Newt blurted. _No, no, no, no, no. NO NO NO_ they screamed at him. “No!” He pulled forward, uselessly, he was trapped here. Agony tore out of him. “Hermann, you let them destroy her?”

There was an odd look on Hermann’s face, and he met Newt’s eyes unflinchingly. “Newton,” said his beautiful betrayer, “I destroyed it personally.”

Newt flung himself back and away from him, and screamed at him. Hermann did flinch then, but only a little, and put his book in his bag slow, careful, like Newt wasn’t flinging himself at the too-tight metal that clung him to this form, like he wasn’t screaming out his fury.

_You underestimate him._

Did Precursors understand irony? _I don’t, I never have._

_He underestimates you_

_Maybe,_ Newt promised, and he didn’t know what he wanted, he didn’t know what he wanted, but they knew, and made it known. He wanted Hermann gone. 

He stopped screaming, and swallowed, and his throat hurt, and he didn’t care: he was made of hurts, but he was made of brighter things, he was kaiju blood and pure impossible brilliance and they could not keep him here. “You weren’t even going to tell me,” Newt croaked. He leaned forward, and Hermann did not flinch.

“Leave this place,” Newt said. Voices from another world screamed out of his throat in harmony, they were in harmony. “Leave this place! We will destroy you! You and all your pitiful little world, and we will make something better, you cannot keep us here, we will destroy everything—”

Long after Hermann was gone they still kept him screaming threats and rage at the locked door and the mirrored walls. They kept him screaming until he tasted blood in his throat. Then he kept going a while longer anyway, out of interest.

Hermann did not come back when he should have.

Time slipped away from him, burned up underneath the hot red sun, but it felt like the time came when Hermann would have come to visit him, and he didn’t. And it came again, and Hermann didn’t. Newt couldn’t keep track, he couldn’t remember, memories peeled away from him like a shuttle hull entering orbit, but Hermann was Hermann, still, Hermann was still himself. If he’d visited more than once he would’ve visited every day. At the same time every day. Probably the best way for Newt to keep track of time in his freewheeling state, now he thought of it, was to set his clock by Hermann. 

But he didn’t come. The days passed and Hermann didn’t come.

At times perhaps he slept, though it may have been something in the tubes. He’d certainly never slept more than a few hours a week before, except when he slept all week. Otherwise he stared into nothing, found himself moving his eyes from side to side, occasionally, tensing all his muscles and then relaxing them. Newt was a little impressed by his new skills of self-preservation, not letting his muscles wither away like old silly string.

_Keep yourself alive._

He took it close to his heart as comfort. They had need of him.

And Hermann didn’t come, and then his small chamber shook, once, as though the whole building or whole island had shook. Like an explosion from far away. Newt came alert, tensed against his bonds, stared at the door.

A loud rumbling noise came from somewhere, distant, muffled, but loud, loud to make it through the walls of his prison. He strained his ears frantically. 

Was … it starting? Were kaiju here on Earth again?

Without him, without telling him.

He was a trusted servant. He couldn’t take being betrayed twice in the same day. Year. Weak. Not Hermann and the Precursors, too. He could not lose both of them.

“Hermann?” Newt said uncertainly, to the empty air. “I’d like to see Hermann.” His guts clenched in contempt: they hated showing weakness. _No, it’s good, pity is good, everyone has always underestimated me._

There was no response, and the building shook again, distantly.

Had Hermann not come to visit him because Newt lost his temper and scared him, or because Hermann was no longer there? An early casualty of a final step in the war?

“Hermann!” Newt shouted, and his room shook, and Hermann was not there. The sun had not risen. For just a moment the landscape painted into his eyelids of swirling blues and reds and violent gold did not feel like home.


	3. Chapter 3

Few things were as powerful as the drift, and no one quite understood it. Certainly no one understood it as well as Newt did. He knew it inside and out, human and alien, alive and dead and the spaces between. It hadn’t been too long since he last drifted with Alice. Not too long.

He strained to slip into the neural link, to stretch his brain beyond his body: he had to get out of here. He had to know why the building was shaking like this. He burned with frustration from every single piece of the collectives that formed him. Needed senses beyond his own small body.

Another distant shake, the boom of explosives, and Newt’s focus flipped sideways and shattered. He did not find the drift. They truly had left him helpless here.

The door clicked open. Hermann charged through, with creases in his jacket, with what looked like dust in his hair. He leaned his back to the door to slam it behind him, and then leaned there, breathing heavily.

Newt’s eyes were riveted. “Hermann,” he said.

Hermann looked up, still breathing raggedly, and gave him a madcap grin. “Pray don’t tell Jake I’m in here,” he said. 

And that was, okay, he couldn’t deal with that, no reasonable force on Earth or even his enigmatic prying masters could possibly expect him to be able to handle that grin, on Hermann’s face, as he made a joke, because he made jokes now. Was that some ghost of Newt’s influence? Maybe he’d been reaching for the wrong drift.

Or Hermann had just learned, and grown, as Newt learned and grew and grew and grew until he strained his borders with the teeming growth. _Rapid mutation in fauna suspected of kaiju contamination._

“All your secrets are safe with me,” Newt said at last. He figured it sounded glib enough. Hermann snorted, anyway.

He staggered to his stool, near collapsed in it, pushing his palm against his thigh. “I’m immensely reassured, Newton,” he said.

“Considering how sane, and trustworthy I am,” Newt said, “and how much I’m a person, who’s still me, your friend, and nobody else in here, just me – think you could tell me what’s going on?”

“From what I can gather, the shatterdome is under attack,” Hermann answered, much more readily than he had expected. “Kaiju worshippers.”

Another explosion from outside, though it sounded more distant. Newt strained forward. “What, you’ve got some kaiju in here?” he said. For just a second he remembered what it was like to be hungry. He wanted this more than he wanted pickle sandwiches and ice cream sundaes and to kiss Hermann. 

Hermann paused, and looked at him sideways.

He should’ve known better than to hope. The echo of feeling faded. Newt sighed. “Just say no and get it over with,” he said. “I can handle disappointment.”

“They’re here for you,” Hermann said. His lips pressed together, that familiar judgmental look descending into his eyes. “To ‘free you from PPDC captivity’. They … There are some that believe you a prophet.”

Humans. Unpredictable. “That’s …” Newt said and floundered. “I mean, okay. Do they have prayers for me?”

“I neglected to inquire,” Hermann bit out crisply. “I was largely concerned with making sure you were alright!”

“But you’ll find out if they have prayers, right?”

The door clicked, and Newt tensed, eyes going to it a moment before Jake Pentecost strode in. He didn’t look as put-together as last time, dust on the shoulders of his uniform, and his jaw clenched tight.

“The situation’s under control,” he said, and looked at Hermann accusingly. “No thanks to you.”

“You hardly need my expertise to fight off an untrained group of cultists,” Hermann said stiffly. Newt grinned at his tone.

“Yeah, man, save his expertise for the important things,” he said. “Someone of Hermann’s caliber can’t just mingle with the common people!”

Comfortingly, the look of irritation that Hermann threw in Newt’s direction had not changed one bit. Jake just glanced at him.

“If someone had to get to you, I’m glad it was Gottlieb,” Jake said, sounding like maybe he wasn’t that glad. “Don’t suppose you’ll tell us anything you know from your side of things?”

Newt shook his head. “Did anyone get hurt?” he said.

Now Jake Pentecost looked at him properly, and Newt was not sure he liked it. He wished they let him have sunglasses. After the tendrils of control crept through him, he had often feared that anyone who looked into his eyes would see the brightly blazing Anteverse and know exactly what he was. 

“Do you care?” Jake said.

Hermann was looking at him, too, thoughtfully. “I, uh, I meant the kaiju worshippers,” Newt said, and gave his best impression of a supervillain grin. He was pretty sure he’d been throwing them out like crazy back when it all went down. “They’re deluded, but I can use them. Not my first time working with damaged parts!”

“Uh-huh,” Jake said, and looked at Hermann, but answered Newt’s question, anyway, like maybe he did still count as a person to the marshal, which was weird, considering. “There’s no casualties, and no major injuries yet. We’re still in rollcall. Want to help me check out the tech, doc?”

“You hardly need me …” Hermann said and then trailed off, as Jake walked out into the corridor without waiting for his answer. Hermann straightened from his chair, sniffed. “Fine,” he said, and walked out as well, and the door clicked shut without a goodbye.

Newt relaxed against his bonds. The apocalypse hadn’t come yet, he hadn’t missed it. Everything would be fine. Hermann would be fine. 

Next time he should make him open the door. That seemed like a real good idea. 

“Listen,” Newt said aloud, “listen, if I had even a scrap of ability to make Hermann Gottlieb do what I wanted, we’d be hand in hand on kaijuback en route to Mt Fuji right now.”

He was relieved and just wanted to sit here, maybe try reaching for the drift connection again to see if Hermann reached back. He was boiling with frustration, adrift in a sky on fire. Instead of sitting calmly he pushed against his bonds so hard they cut, and then kept pushing, watching himself force his limbs dangerously hard as the metal dug into his flesh. Completely unable to stop.

_Human. You’re still human._

“Yeah?” Newt gasped out. “You need to make me bleed to prove it?”

Of course his blood was still red, still hateful, human red. 

His limbs went slack again. Newt let out a breath in relief. “I’m here, we’re here, it’s fine, we’re fine,” he said, and closed his eyes. He could not claim, even to himself, that he and the Precursors felt anything like harmony right now. It was discordant jangling, it was screaming in his ears. The remembered alien landscape brought him something like peace. “I’ll get him to open the door next time,” Newt promised. “Next time.”

But maybe the time after that, if Hermann brought a good enough book.

 

 

 

Hermann’s ears still rang from the explosions. But he’d been through worse. At least Newt was alright. As alright as Newt ever was.

Jake slowed his pace a little, making it easier to keep up. “We record what he says when he’s on his own,” Jake said. “You should listen, there’s some interesting stuff.”

For just a moment the idea appealed to him. Hermann shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m not actually studying him. I am his friend.” Like if he said it often enough it would become true, and their bond real and undeniable, and Newt there, on the other side of it, close enough that he could be saved. 

It occurred to him that outside of crisis situations, he should not make a habit of disagreeing with one of the few people higher in authority than he was. Hermann tensed, ready to fight back if Jake shouted him down, ready to insist he knew best.

“Yeah,” Jake said and looked thoughtfully back down the corridor. “I think I saw a bit of him in there.” He sighed. “Whatever you’re doing, I hope it works.” He smiled, not really at anything. “Nothing like a drift partner to get you out of trouble.”

Hermann nodded. His leg was starting to burn, and Jake didn’t say anything else. Maybe the line about tech had just been to get him away from Newton. Hermann cleared his throat. “Jacob—”

“It’s Jacobean, actually,” Jake said, loping confidently. 

Hermann missed a step, stumbled, had to rush to catch up. He stared at the marshal. He had not expected the late Stacker of such cruelty when it came to names, but he couldn’t say he’d ever checked the files, either. “… Is it?”

“Nope,” Jake said, and gave him a grin with steel behind it. “It’s Jake.”

Hermann coughed, and shifted his bag over his chest as they walked. “… Jake,” he said, awkwardly. “Is it conceivable I could ever get him out of there?”

Jake rolled his shoulders and gave him a friendly look, not especially threatening.

“Not like that, of course,” Hermann hastened to add. “Not out of supervision! Merely to some place where he could be just a little freer. I do think it would do wonders for his mental health.”

“Good,” Jake said distractedly. “Wonders are what we need.” He shook his head. “Gottlieb, I’ll think about it, but there’s a lot going on right now.” He clasped Hermann’s shoulder and tugged him into a doorway, out of the main corridor. Dropped his voice. “I have a lead on Mako.”

“Ms Mori?” Hermann said, and clutched the strap of his bag tighter, and blinked rapidly. “She’s … alive?”

Jake shrugged, but hope flared through Hermann, flung open the doors he’d kept locked tight. Mako had died so easily, but he’d learned through the wars that heroes died just like normal women and men. But maybe. Maybe just this once.

“It’s thin,” Jake said. Maybe it was just the light, but it looked tired. “Don’t tell anyone. We don’t know it’s her, but someone from near that wreckage was found alive and taken to hospital. They’ve left now, but there’ll be a paper trail. Maybe. But if it’s her, why wouldn’t she just come straight home?” he burst, and for a second Hermann saw the grieving brother as well as the battle-hardened commander.

He respected Pentecost, and gave his answer some thought. “It depends whether she has had access to the news,” Hermann said. “She may still be suspicious of Shao, and we do have prominent Shao branding, these days.”

“Maybe she started to suspect Geiszler too,” Jake said. He did sound tired. Hermann could sympathize readily enough with that. He shook his head. “So, uh, I’m more on my sister than on your scientist, right now.” He stepped out of the corridor, and turned back and shot Hermann a grin. The light shone on his face, made him look younger even than he was. “Maybe she’ll be back tomorrow, or a week from now, and I won’t even have to worry about what to do with Geiszler. She’ll just take charge as cool and competent as ever.” He shrugged. “Here’s hoping.”

“Here’s hoping,” Hermann echoed. Hope felt like the domain of fools and madmen. And yet. 

Mako, Newton, maybe all their fallen warriors could be saved. Maybe then he could sleep at night, with no nightmares to hound at him and haunt him. Maybe hope was an impossibility worth fighting for.

 

 

 

Newt kept his eyes closed. That way he could drift on the colors and vague snatches of memory, daydream of broken worlds and gaping mouths at the bottom of the sea, chomp chomp chomp chomp chomp.

Hermann’s familiar voice threatened to ground him. “I did bring you a newspaper, but you featured on the second page.” His voice was testy and annoyed. So familiar. Clashing, jangling, out of key when Newt’s mind’s eye was cities burning.

“So I disposed of it,” Hermann continued. A while later, gentler, worried. “Newt? Are you in there?”

Since when did he even call him Newt. Since where, maybe. Hong Kong? Had it been that long?

“Move your hand if you can,” Hermann said. 

Newt swallowed. He couldn’t keep this up in the face of Hermann’s quiet undemanding determination. “They don’t want me to talk to you,” Newt informed him, keeping his eyes closed.

He heard Hermann let out a breath. The scrape of his stool as he moved. His voice, wry. “If they expect there to be any more at most five minutes’ shelf life in any plan that involves making you sit still and be quiet, they don’t know my Newton.”

Newt’s breath dragged in his throat. He bounced his leg, then stopped, irritably, when he realized that would prove Hermann right. “Uh.”

The screaming in his mind wasn’t too bad, as it went. He opened his eyes. Hermann was looking him with naked fondness. Newt turned his head and frowned thoughtfully at the wall, like there was something he needed to study.

He cleared his throat, then coughed loudly a few times. “I mean sure,” he said and frowned at Hermann. “You’re smart. Pretty smart. You’ve gotta know it’s not that simple, right?”

“Mmhmm?” Hermann said.

Sitting attentively. Listening to Newt talk. God, maybe he could get used to that, even if it was just Hermann trying to slice him into tidy enough parts he could make the equation come out any better.

He wanted him to understand. He really really did want him to understand. If anyone could understand it was Hermann. After Hong Kong. After everything before. _Pretty smart._ Yeah.

“It’s not, I’m not,” Newt said, “ _subdivided_ , it’s not just me and them and a line down the middle.” He let out a breath, clenching his fists. “The wall didn’t hold, Herms, you know the wall didn’t hold. We broke through.”

He waited for Hermann to flinch away from all his confusions, but Hermann just nodded. Letting the information in, filing it away. Newt really had been all things to him: enemy and friend, and then real enemy, in the end, and now he got to be a damn guest lecturer.

“I’m asking nicely,” Hermann said. “Please let me have my friend back.”

The lump in his throat made it hard to swallow, or speak, and he’d only cleared his throat just before. Inefficient system. “Sure, asking politely, that’s going to work.”

“It’s admittedly never worked with you before,” Hermann said, his old wry humor. 

Newt shook his head, and chewed at his lip. “So do you think it’s me or don’t you?” he snapped. “Make up your mind who to talk to.”

“I am talking to my oldest friend, Doctor Newton Geiszler,” Hermann said. Newt scowled at him, to hide the odd feeling of tightness in his chest from anyone watching. Hermann grimaced back. “And I am talking to the hostile alien consciousnesses that have invaded his brilliant but flawed brain. I’ll make up my mind on which of those you are when you decide yourself, Newton. Between yourselves. If you can decide.” He hooked his glasses up his nose. “I imagine they have opinions on the matter, but I think on that one point, you may disagree.” 

His head started to hurt. Nothing like after his first drift with the first Alice when all the world was starpoint-bright and colliding randomly into noise, but nothing great either. Pretty obvious they didn’t like him talking to Hermann. But Hermann was still here, even after everything. And besides, being patronized to made him bristle. He felt the urge to be contrary, to all of them. “Flawed?” he said, and would’ve waved a hand at his head if he could. “This thing? Come on.”

“You pushed yourself too hard,” Hermann said calmly.

He distinctly remembered not being the one who’d thrown up in a toilet. He stretched the memory out over his mind’s eye, inviting Precursors to join him in laughing at Hermann. “You want to talk about flaws?” Newt said. “I remember being in your head, man, we can do flaws all day.”

Hermann winced a very little, but sighed, and met his eyes. “We certainly can if it would help your recovery,” he said, though it clearly dragged at him.

Newt bit his lip, shifted back, scowling. He didn’t mean to snap at him this much; it just happened. He could honestly not tell whether that was old habit or new. 

“I am talking to my old friend, now,” Hermann said quietly. He leaned forward, and adjusted his glasses again and swallowed. Crabbed over and awkward and trying his best. “ _Mein Freund_. Help me.”

All was quiet, in his head. Newt didn’t trust it. Made him think of riptides, of spined backs emerging from still water. “So this actually is your big plan,” he said. “You’re going to save me, huh?” He nearly believed it. They had done some impossible things. 

“I’m no one’s savior,” said Hermann motherfucking Gottlieb who saved the world with math and sheer nerve. Twice. Now that was replicability. “That wouldn’t work. I want to … help you, as you help yourself.”

Waves surging up, up, all walls breached, his neural pathways were ninety percent alarm sirens at this point and oh wasn’t that just perfect because he was the siren, really, out on the rocks and singing the breaches open. Newt strained against the chair, struggled against the waves. He peeled back his lips to grin at him desperately. “I just can’t help myself, Hermann!” 

Hermann leaned forward, attentive, concerned. His long fingers inching towards Newt’s hand. Newt jerked his head at him suddenly, snapping his teeth, and Hermann reared back. Newt laughed. He dropped his voice to a whisper, dug his eyes into Hermann’s. “I’ve got kaiju on the brain!”

Hermann made a show of shifting back onto his stool, scraping it against the ground, but slow, like he wasn’t running away. Newt let his grin stay stretched over his face, bleak, a skeletal outcropping. 

Hermann … shifted his stool closer, actually. He sat there and clasped his hands tight together, fingers shifting restlessly. Hermann never used to have quite this many nervous tics.

Irritable genius Hermann Gottlieb. His mind was the second-most beautiful thing Newt had ever been lucky enough to see.

“There are pieces of kaiju in you,” Hermann said. Newt flinched back, stretched his grin broader, desperately, as though it didn’t hurt. Hermann met his eyes. “There are pieces of Precursor and alien intelligence. Yes.”

Newt turned his head away, but Hermann did take his hand, then, and gave an urgent squeeze. Newt turned back. Hermann was glaring at him. Well, that was more familiar.

“But that means there is a piece of Newton in them,” Hermann said. His eyes blazed. They really did. “And I know Newton Geiszler. Those mother—those—those nitwits should be scared!”

Newt was lost, drifting, all roiling seas. Pushed under, dragged down deep, bathypelagic, mesopelagic, compelled to abyss. 

A line had him hooked, though. Tugged him contrariwise. Something older and far more familiar than the complex concreted feelings he had for Hermann.

Pride. Sheer insulted pride.

He was Newton motherfucking Geiszler, who had drifted with the apocalypse, twice, five times, a hundred times and still lived and who the other smartest man on earth still called _brilliant_ and damn, though, damn, those motherfuckers absolutely should be scared.

Newt squeezed his hand back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Do tell me if my faltering attempt at German doesn't make sense!)


	4. Chapter 4

Hermann’s mouth was quite dry after he finished reading the chapter, so he subsided into silence, tucking the book behind his papers and frowning absentmindedly down at the notes he’d brought.

Newton spoke for the first time that day. “Stop that tapping, man,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

Hermann’s pen stilled against the paper. He carefully did not look at Newt. The effort of fighting back two days’ prior had cost him, and this was the first time he’d talked. His silence was disconcerting, though in its own way honestly quite nice. Causing a song and hurrah about his reemergence into speech would not do any good, however. “Consider it payback for my having to butcher one of those disgusting creatures,” Hermann said, and gave him a look. “I would not have needed to if you’d been there.”

Newt didn’t rise into the argument like he’d wanted, just looked at him, dreary. He’d never been one for the outdoors any more than Hermann was, but his prolonged confinement had bleached whatever color he had out of him, left him pale and sickly as kaiju bones. “No, because it wouldn’t have happened at all,” Newt said. “Hermann, come on. You’re wasting your time here.”

Hermann shrugged, mouth clamped shut. He looked down at his work. Merely hypothetical physics equations, nothing of kaiju or of breach. He deserved something relaxing.

He resumed tapping the end of his pen against the paper.

“At least fight back,” Newt said. His voice too was rusty, but evidently that wasn’t enough to keep him from talking. Hermann shifted papers to hide his grin. “Throw some chalk or something!” Newt continued. “You being this nice is straightup the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me. Really think about that.”

“I value your presence, Newton,” Hermann said, which was easier to deliver from behind a sheaf of equations so he did not have to be looking at Newt as he said it. He slashed a decisive line at random and lowered the book.

Newt was looking at him like a puzzle that needed solving, face scrunched up. It was frankly adorable. Hermann hadn’t planned on this, but if he couldn’t bring Newton any proper intellectual work for risk of it being compromised, at least he could give his mind something to do.

Newt said slowly, “Are you gonna seduce me?”

Hermann’s papers flew from his hands. “I, I,” he spluttered. He bent to gather them back up, head ducked down low, taking longer about it than he perhaps needed to. Even his neck felt flushed hot with embarrassment. He shoved papers together roughly, with no mind for order, and straightened and coughed. “If I was here to seduce you, I would have worn something more revealing,” he said, aiming for a wry and casual tone, and missing it by a margin that would have seen any prospective ranger very quickly discharged from the jaeger program.

“Dude no,” Newt said, “you’re sexy as hell in that vintage professor look.”

Impulsively, quick and thoughtless as Newt always talked now he was back to talking. Hermann opened his mouth and then clamped it firmly shut. Anything he thought of to say sounded terrifically inane.

Newt’s laugh had an odd sound to it. “I mean, you know, if, uh,” Newt said. Babbled, really. “If you like stern old mathematicians, and who would. Give me Leatherback any day!”

“I shan’t,” Hermann said.

Newt laughed properly.

Perhaps it had all been a joke, which was an idea Hermann didn’t want to examine too closely but would at least be within the normal range of their old interactions. It made him a little more comfortable. He shuffled his paperwork, putting it into proper order. “Why … do you think I would seduce you, Newton?” If it came out a little strangled that could hardly be helped.

Newton shrugged. “Dunno,” he said, and his leg started to bounce. “Not on purpose, obviously. It’s not like I think it’d be on the top of like, your vision board, which I know you have, Hermann, don’t lie to me. But I don’t know why else you’d be like this!”

Hermann wanted to know what ‘this’ was, exactly, and yet feared to ask. “I told you,” he said, vaguely. He was not able to be quite so open again about his fondness this immediately after Newton’s … remark. 

“If it’s to get,” Newt said, and stopped, and then said, “Information,” and then stopped again.

Hermann was not aware he had stood up until his leg registered its usual sharp stab of complaint. Newton stared at him wide-eyed, rather owlish. Hermann put the book and papers carefully down on his stool, and grasped his cane, and took a step closer to him.

“Have they been whispering to you that’s why I’m here?” he said, gripping the handle of his cane tightly, to fight his rising fury. “A ploy of Pentecost’s to get the information we need out of you?” It was even true, as far as it went, but there were far more immutable truths. There were universal constants. Newt should not look that pale and sick and resigned, after Hermann had fully and repeatedly committed to doing everything required to bring him back.

Hermann stepped closer. “They’re panicking because they know they are going to lose. Because nothing can stand against the two of us together,” he said. Newton’s leg had stopped bouncing, and now his fingers were rubbing together restlessly, instead. “Newton.” He stepped closer still, as close as the chair would allow him, and dropped his voice and nearly growled: “I’m not here for information. I am here. For you.”

Newton stared up at him with wide eyes. Then he jerked forward, and Hermann gripped his cane grimly, half-bracing himself to be headbutted – only, Newt’s lips were pressed to his. And Newt was strained forward in his seat, and his eyes were closed, and he was kissing him.

Hermann let out a startled huff of breath against his lips. Newt’s eyes started to slide open, his brow furrowing in question, and Hermann put a hand to his jaw and hastily kissed him back.

And at last. At last. Here was the picture every point had been plotted for. Here their courses that had run endlessly alongside each other collided at last.

Hermann cupped Newt’s jaw, then shifted his hand gently to the back of his head, stroking through his hair. Newt’s lips were dry and his mouth tasted sour, and his hair was coarse, and at the motion his mouth opened a little wider, like the ghost of a sigh. After the first rush of kiss, Newt didn’t press, but kissed him … softly. His breaths were short and careful. Hermann followed his lead, but deepened it, opening his mouth wider, the motions unfamiliar. It had been a long time. And he had not kissed Newton before. Everything felt unfamiliar, and yet so known.

Hermann leaned in, curling his hands at the back of Newt’s head, and Newt sighed out against him and kissed him, kissed him, and they made a warmer space, there between them, safe. And Hermann stroked through his hair, and broke back for a moment to kiss his nose and the corner of his mouth before kissing him again, and he was here, finally, kissing infuriating beautiful maddening tragic Newton Geiszler right on the mouth. 

Unless it wasn’t Newton.

Hermann didn’t want to think of that, but when he did he froze. He carefully loosened his grip on Newt’s hair. This felt like Newt, he kissed like Newt, but there were – issues, of consent, of autonomy, when Newton’s inclinations were not the sole ones that might be driving his body. Concerns, not that he was not of right mind but that he was not alone in it.

He just had to be sure. Just had to make certain, and then he could keep kissing him, for at least the next hour, or maybe two, if Pentecost could be persuaded to let him overstay his welcome. Hermann did not feel much inclined today to do anything other than leisurely kiss Newt Geiszler, and maybe finish his book, after.

He leaned back carefully. Newt chased the contact as far as he could go, then stopped at the limits of his chair’s bonds, blinking up at him. Another concern.

Hermann pressed a hand carefully to his mouth, then lowered it. “Newton?” he said.

Newt’s eyes were blown wide and stunned. “Hermann,” he said. His voice hitched and caught.

Hermann tried to smile at him, and it was hard to, not because he did not feel like smiling but because of the other things he wanted to do rather more.

“Hermann,” Newt said, and then he threw himself back against the chair and shook his head violently, once, twice. “Hermann, no, that – you’ve gotta believe me, that wasn’t me, it was them. Hermann!”

Hermann took a slow, measured step back. He shifted both hands to the handle of his cane. Newt stared at him, frantic: so desperate to convince him of this unwished-for truth.

A truth he had not wanted to be immutable, that Newton did not want to kiss him.

“It wasn’t me,” Newt gabbled. “It wasn’t me, I promise, Hermann, it was them.” His eyes were so huge and pleading, and Hermann did not really understand any of this, but he knew it was time to go. Knew, also, he could not leave Newt needing something from him like this. So he managed a nod. Newt exhaled in relief. It would have to do.

“Until next time,” Hermann said, the only thing he could think of to say, and he gathered up his things in a hurry, slipping them into his bag, and turned and gave Newt a short bow, of all things, before he hurriedly left the room.

He had to go back after a moment, as he’d forgotten to doublecheck that the door had locked behind him. It had; though he was not too worried about safety concerns if this was the current grand Precursor strategy, as Newt was not too likely, he hoped, to have the capacity to inflict anyone else in this station with the phantom but pressingly physical pain of heartbreak. 

As Hermann loped along he pressed a fist to his chest, and grimaced. “Sentimental fool,” he muttered. “Soft-hearted, impulsive …”

It sounded like it was Newt he was describing. And he never used to be in the habit of talking to himself, either.

He pressed his fist hard to his mouth, shook his head.

 

 

 

Newt had finally kissed Hermann. The world hadn’t flipped on its axis and no one was speaking in tongues. _His_ world had flipped on its axis, maybe, a tiny bit.

Objectively speaking, and he could argue about objective versus subjective all day, and had, many times, with Hermann – objectively, it hadn’t been a great kiss. Not even close. The PPDC didn’t let him brush his own teeth in case he used a toothbrush to open the Breach or something, and sometimes he spat the mouthwash out just to watch the violent blue of it and feel more at home. Also, Newt wasn’t really in his body right now, or he was too much in his body, maybe, or it was too much in him.

But he couldn’t stop thinking about it. How quiet Hermann had gone. Like that was the answer to the subjectivity debate all along, just kissing him quiet for a while until the words resurged back and they went back to arguing. It sounded nice. He wished his hands were free so he could have touched Hermann’s dumb haircut. He wished a lot of things.

Hermann tasted human. He hated it. 

Newt wanted to kiss him until he tasted human, too.

But he doubted that would come up, from how quickly Hermann had ran from the room despite Newt’s best efforts, and also because of how he was being possessed by world-destroying forces. Maybe if he asked nicely, Newt could kiss him again. Then again it wasn’t like it had been Newt that kissed him last time.

“What was up with that?” Newt said. He rolled back his head as far as he could, and stared up at the ceiling. “If you wanted to use me to kiss handsome guys we could’ve just gone to a good nightclub. Or basically anywhere. Really not seeing how this fits into your plan here, boss.” The _boss_ just slipped out, but it didn’t feel quite right, and Newt huddled up with a wince, because as soon as he’d thought about how wrong it felt, a glimmering constellation of eyes turned and narrowed in on him and he was cut wide open and raw and he hadn’t meant it, he hadn’t, of course it was fine, it was fine.

“I just don’t see why it had to be Hermann,” he tried. “We were having a good talk.”

Better not to talk to Hermann again, if Newt was this unpredictable.

What. No? No, that wasn’t right. Hermann could make his own choices, and Newt was literally tied to a chair. He couldn’t hurt him worse than he …. Already had. 

Newt swallowed. And they pressed the advantage. 

_Remember what you did to him?_

He shivered convulsively, cold all over. “Turn up the heat in here,” he yelled at the window, because it wasn’t like whoever was watching him today didn’t hate him already, how could anyone not.

He couldn’t even sink into guilty joy at the remembered taste of Hermann’s mouth. Not when it was comorbid with his hands twined around Hermann’s neck. Hermann’s eyes, pleading. Made so easily quiet.

Newt could talk endlessly at Hermann, but he’d need five lifetimes laid end to end to ever be able to apologize enough. 

Not today, though, because Newt had done his best to keep track, and Hermann was late. Hermann wasn’t ever late. He tried not to hope, but he still twitched upright when the door clicked, as the handle started to turn. Then he sagged back in disappointment.

“Geiszler,” Jake Pentecost said. He hadn’t come by so much since the first few weeks. _Zoo exhibits lose their interest, huh._

Newt tried to hide his disappointment that he wasn’t Hermann. “Pentecost Junior,” he replied. “Pentwocost? Listen,” and he really couldn’t help it, “can’t help noticing you’re not Hermann. I kind of was …” There was no way to make _spiraling into moral crisis_ sound cool. “Well, waiting for Hermann.”

Jake rubbed a thumb tiredly over his forehead. “I know, mate, you’ve been yelling about it.”

“So … is he sick, or …”

“Sick, or just sick of you?” Jake said and shrugged. “No idea, you two aren’t why I’m here. Wanted to talk to you.”

“I still want to help,” Newt said immediately. “With your plan. I mean, haha, what plan? Any plan. I want to help.”

Jake rocked back on his feet, lifting his eyebrows a tiny bit. Like Newt was a strong gale. Newt scowled at him. “Sure, help,” Jake said. He shook his head. “Geiszler—”

“Call me Newt.”

“Mako’s alive.”

Everything was silent for a second.

“Mako?” Newt squeaked. Precursors wouldn’t be happy about this, so he knew without a doubt that the warm rush of feeling that made his feet want to tap and mouth bust out song lyrics was his own properly Newtonian joy. That might not be as good as Hermann coming back but it was still good, he’d been given one good thing. “She’s alive!” He leaned forward excitedly. “Can I see her?”

Silence, for longer, and Jake didn’t look coldly sarcastic or lift his eyebrows devastatingly. He just looked kind of sorry for him. That was worse.

Right.

One of his drones. Kaiju through all its internal systems, an interlay of organic reprogramming, the blameless jaeger jerked by puppet strings of sinew to swat down a hero from the sky. 

Newt thought he could imagine how it felt in that moment. His rogue jaeger.

“Right,” he said.

He felt like vomiting, and everything about the concept of vomiting made him feel like vomiting, and so on and so on, an endless recursion. Incursion. No, that was what he’d failed to do. No, that was what had been done to him.

He reached for contrariness and gripped it easy, solid and reassuring in the hand as a vertebra. “So why are you even telling me,” Newt rasped. He jerked his head, shrugged one shoulder upwards, trying to indicate his own mind. “Do you _want_ them to know?”

Jake smiled and shook his head. He didn’t seem terribly concerned, considering. He was so effortless, radiating an easy confidence Newt had often sought for but that his touch always turned into bravado like a Midas of insecurity. Jake felt made of rock and steel. Jake felt like all the worst and best parts of human inventiveness. Scrappiness that could surprise you.

“I think your Gottlieb is right,” he said. “I think they should be scared.”

Of course the PPDC were recording him.

“I mean duh,” Newt said, and then caught up to himself. “I mean, no, what? We should be scared. They. We, they, humans should be scared of _us_.”

The Precursors were scared of Hermann.

That thought drifted past and he caught it, barely believing, and it tried to escape but he still had the ghost of it, half an image. They were scared of Hermann. He didn’t know why exactly, but why else would they try so hard to drive him away?

So Hermann really could save him. Or help him to save himself, like a badass. Maybe.

And he thought of that, but all the while he was split up into separate samples with different cultures growing growing, running concurrent: a portion of his mind still thinking _Hermann Hermann Hermann_ Hermann’s kiss Hermann’s hand in his hair Hermann’s look of bleak betrayal as Newt’s hands clenched tight. And a portion reserved for picturing Mako, over and over, a thing he had not actually seen but replayed in his mind’s eye, her chopper spiraling down, as though repeating the experiment with no change in variables could result in anything but the inevitable failure that was success. And a piece of his mind laid relentless underneath, thinking about how to get to the miraculously surviving Mako Mori, and neutralize her.

He sighed.

“She’s sure not about to see you though,” Jake said. “Considering.”

Newt looked up at him. Felt mournful and beaten down, like he wasn’t already and always trapped here like a victim, though he was fairly certain only Hermann _maybe_ Hermann saw him as one. (Hermann, Hermann, his long fingers cradling the back of Newt’s head like it was precious.) (Mako somewhere in the base, somewhere close by, strategies flitting past: where was the nearest scalpel? The nearest gun?)

“That’s,” Newt said. “Fair.”

“I’m telling you because I figured you’d want to know,” Jake said. “Because she’s your friend.” And he left.

Big man on the base Jake Pentecost, not even giving Newt a proper authority figure to rage against, because he was too kind.

“I don’t think genius kaiju puppets get to have friends,” Newt remarked. Jake was already gone, but Newt was never alone. In oh so many ways. “I’m not an assassin,” he added, irritably, but he kept thinking of knives, of where they could be and how to reach them, so he diverted his mind as best he could instead: Hermann butchering a kaiju, how hilarious and beautiful a sight that must have been, like, did he wear an apron, gloves, maybe a hazmat suit, did he do that adorable face he did when Newt got blood on his side of the lab. It was mostly successful.

And Hermann did come back the next day, at the same time as ever. Newt set his clock by him, and the world turned. 

 

 

 

Jake closed the door behind him, then once it was locked slumped back up against it, sighing.

“He’s happy you’re alive,” he said, holding up his hand. “That’s the good news.” He balled his hand into a loose fist. “Kind of looks like he wants to assassinate you, so that’s the less good news.”

Mako nodded. “It is probably for the best I do not see him yet,” she said, and looked at the door with a slight frown.

Mako had always been better than him at procedure and protocol, and doing what was right, not necessarily what was easy. Jake still inconspicuously shifted between her and the door in case she got any humanitarian urges. She looked at him, and he crossed his arms to make the motion cool and casual.

One arm was in a sling, but the forehead gash she’d been treated for at the hospital had theoretically healed enough to be left open to the air, and seeing the stitches made him wince. Mako was a soldier, though. He’d always known that. She stood like a soldier, like a warrior who could not rest yet, crisp and efficient in the uniform jacket she’d donned once she was back in the base. It was … for a second it made it feel like Stacker could come home. Too. Back, miraculous, wiping the blood from his nose and announcing his plan to save them all.

Stacker wasn’t here. But they were.

“It is good the cult did not get to him,” she said. “Even if it is unclear what their precise plans were after that point, having someone with his Precursor connection in the hands of people susceptible to influence is not wise.” Mako had taken over questioning, and Jake had let her with relief. And Mako’s questioning involved a lot more of people being let go with some stern warnings than anything else. And that was a relief too.

“Yup,” Jake said. And waited. Mako was no coward. 

He saw her stance shift just slightly, the way it did when she was taking on unwanted official duties that she would nevertheless carry out to her utmost. Mako said, “Did he have anything to do with it?”

Jake shrugged, and said, “He asked if anyone was hurt.”

Mako’s frown went thoughtful.

“Certainly dangerous in a way,” she said, “but much less so in our hands than others, and that same connection can be used to advantage. Even leaving aside the debt we owe to each other, as people, and as survivors.” She nodded as if coming to a decision. “You did well.”

“Cheers, glad you agree,” Jake said. “Don’t feel you have to go delegating on me or anything though.”

Mako smiled a tiny bit. Dammit. Of course she was going to.

She turned and walked down the corridor, but slowly, not with the swift stride that meant they had anywhere to be. Jake fell into pace easily beside her. He was content just to walk a while. It was easy to start feeling pent up in here, and sometimes he had to excuse himself from meetings with some fake emergency just so he could get to the nearest exit door and stand there breathing in big lungfuls of the sky.

After a while, Mako said, “Doctor Geiszler taught me kaiju weakpoints.” She took a turn, not looking at Jake, attention focused ahead of her. “Even before he proved his hindbrain theory, he taught me where to strike, how to predict where they bore their weight even though each one was so different. And he taught me how to cheat at chess.”

It mostly consisted of making your opponent furious until they threw pieces and yelled at you and stalked away. Cheating at chess worked on no one but Gottlieb, and for no one but Geiszler. “Yeah, I remember.”

“He deserves rest,” Mako said and shook her head. “If he has information, we need it. There is no rest for him yet.”

Jake wished to hell and aching that he didn’t know so well what sorrow looked like on her. “No one can rest yet, sis,” he said. “Not yet.” Mako still looked tired.

He held up his hand, curled in a fist. She gave him a look, like she was too busy being the important head of the Pan Pacific Saving The World Corps to mess around with her brother. Then she bumped their fists together, and pulled hers back going ‘whoosh!’ and waving her fingers, like a tiny explosion.

Jake grinned huge, huge. His sister being back felt like the ceiling being pulled up, the walls of this steel cage unfolding. Like seeing all the sky spread out again, still blue.


	5. Chapter 5

After five minutes of Hermann sitting companionably and scrawling on his ridiculous stack of yellowed real papers, Newt drew in a deep breath. “So what are you working on?” he said. It wasn’t what he wanted to ask.

Hermann looked at him, and there was that same split-second as always. The moment of deciding whether to trust him, which him he was right then. _It’s all me, Herms, and it’s all them_ , and Jesus, Newt had not expected to be haunted by the messy classification problem this far out of his third PHD. He made a note in his head to tell Hermann about that, but not before he answered the question, because Newt was good about that, or better than when they first met, anyway, no longer chasing each thought down and down the rabbit hole and leaving Hermann infuriated. Which was warranted. Heheh. 

The thoughts reeled by, the split-second passed, and Hermann replied readily. “I’m designing a new subtype of Pons interface,” he said. He tapped his pen against the page, though he didn’t turn it to show Newt like he would’ve once. “It’s similar to the one used for training cadets, meant for a single person, and with, hrm, an attempt to record neural firing – a look into the mind, as it were.”

“Neat,” Newt whispered raptly. Then the implications hit and he recoiled.

Hermann answered his unspoken fear hastily. “It still needs perfecting,” he said. “I have grave concerns about the ethics of such an instrument, whether the procedure will prove to be lifesaving or merely invasive.” Newt breathed out, and Hermann looked at him. Compassionately, or kindly, Newt struggled to tell the difference. Hermann tucked his pen into his notebook and said gently, “Do not worry.”

Maybe that was how Hermann would outshine him as a scientist in the end. By thinking through implication and consequence before he chased after the promise of new tech. _Dammit, Hermann._ At least he never won at chess.

“You can look in my brain, if you want,” Newt offered. Hermann glanced over at him, looking faintly insulted at the idea, yet intrigued. Newt shrugged one shoulder as best he could. “I mean, you’ve been in there already. Maybe give me a while to uh, tidy the place up a bit, but—”

“It is not an action I can take immediately,” Hermann said, “the equipment needs trialing, as I have said, but – yes, Newton. I do think that would help.” He looked awkward. “Help you perhaps, and help …” He looked to one side, to where Newt was pretty sure the observation room was, or maybe the camera. Cameras? The thought of being constantly watched, recorded, made him want to slip out of his skin and bore down through the floor like an acid.

“Help the cause?” Newt said.

“It would aid in them trusting you,” Hermann said, “and me eventually getting you out of here. I would be much indebted, mein Freund.”

“Haha, yeah,” Newt said automatically, because if Hermann kept calling him that Newt was gonna suffer from six consecutive heart attacks and die, it just wasn’t fair. Did he _know_ how ambiguous that was? Probably, because how could he not. Maybe he just didn’t think of it, typical stuffy Hermann, but ‘are you calling me your friend or your boyfriend’ was another question he was way, way too afraid to ask.

Like honestly pants-shittingly terrified. Like more scared than he was with his megakaiju staring right at him or his boss pointing a gun at him or the PPDC grunts roughing him up, more scared than of anything else in the world.

The fear maybe helped. Like it overrode everything else, a level below fight or flight but an intriguing theory all the same, brainwise. Here Hermann was talking about helping him, and the kaiju and Precursors barely made a noise at all, and he was able to keep visions of the other plane away, as long as his eyes were open. 

Hermann looked at him oddly, dear Hermann, still here. Newt swallowed and said, “See like, I’m glad you’re back, man. I’m really glad you came back, legitimately I was pretty sure you wouldn’t? I was running, like, scenarios, and I one hundred percent blame you for that, by the way, one hundred and ten percent,” throwing that in just to annoy him, “I never used to run scenarios, who _does_ that, frigging nerds is who. But uh here you are.”

Hermann nodded silently. Then he straightened his shoulders a little, drawing in a deep breath. Oh, no. He was gonna talk about feelings.

_He is going to be honest about his contempt for you._

_Shut up, lalala, not listening!_

Newt fixed a smile on his face and tried to look at Hermann attentively. 

“I should not have missed our appointment yesterday,” Hermann said awkwardly. _Appointment_ , honestly, why was Hermann like this. “Whatever else I was – reacting to. Some constancy right now is important. But I did need to take a little time to get my thoughts into order.” That was saying something, for Hermann, his thoughts were practically alphabetized. Hermann continued, “I had a good conversation with Maria.”

“Your girlfriend,” Newt said.

Hermann looked at him oddly. “My therapist.”

“Oh, yeah,” Newt said. He did recall Hermann mentioning that.

Why even clarify, he could’ve just said _meine Freundin_ and make Newt even more confused than he already was, not that it really mattered, because they couldn’t date, because he couldn’t go out on dates because he was tied to a chair because his brain was evil and also, life sucked. “I’m uh,” Newt said, “I’m glad if she helps.”

Hermann leaned forward a little in his seat. “I really do think—”

“Anyway,” Newt babbled, “let me apologize at least ten more times—”

He stopped. Hermann stopped first, which he might’ve counted as a victory, except none of his victories counted when Hermann was just being nice to him.

“Go on,” Hermann said slowly. “What is it you think you need to apologize for?”

Hermann really didn’t need to keep insisting he got a therapist, when he was practically being one. Or maybe not. Ethics again. Newt never used to forget ethics _quite_ this often. He drew in a big deep breath, really feeling it: lungs expanding, getting that good oxygen all up in his alveoli, all through his bloodstream, keeping this frail collection of organisms alive. If he fumbled this and Hermann did leave for good, at least he’d still have his gut flora. “Kissing you,” Newt said.

Hermann leaned very slightly back. Newt wouldn’t have noticed if he wasn’t paying attention, but he was paying very, very close attention. _Shouldn’t have brought it up. Just keep going, forge on._

“You do not need to apologize for that,” Hermann said very stiffly.

Him being this nice really was so so weird. “Like, no, I know it wasn’t me,” Newt said, and Hermann winced slightly, “but – I mean – it’s still my body, yeah? So.” He shrugged.

Hermann shook his head “It wasn’t you,” he said. “Don’t worry yourself. It doesn’t count for anything.” His voice was nearly toneless.

Okay Newt had super kissed back once that whole deal had started, but he’d maybe keep that one on the down-low. 

“I would like to know why,” Hermann said, “if you have any idea, and if it won’t harm you to think of it.”

“They aren’t gonna like, torture me if I think the wrong thing,” Newt said, and then slid his mind deftly away from even considering otherwise. “Uh, but dude, that’s easy. They thought it would drive you off.” He grinned fondly and with just a hint of possessive pride, at how Hermann was still stuffily here, designing interfaces and being a general badass. “They underestimated your uh … friendship … powers?”

“But why would they think that would work?”

“Well, they,” Newt stammered. “They’re in my head.”

Hermann leaned forward, brows furrowed, eyes sharp behind his glasses. “Then why would you think that?”

He always loved Hermann’s attention on him, but it sucked being under the microscope, held rigid in a slide. Hunter became the hunted, he guessed. 

He ran his tongue over his lips, shifted back, uncomfortably human, all too mired in memories. How to even answer that. How to iterate something so unthought of, engrained enough to be instinctual? It was just how things were. The background beat to his workdays back before either apocalypse, subtler than the music he blasted. _Keep on track do the work do the work save the world be a rockstar, don’t kiss Hermann’s cute face, fuck, he’s a genius, fuck, what an asshole, don’t kiss his face, don’t mess this up, do the work, there is always the work._

He’d left it too long to make up a reason. Hermann said, “We have been friends a long time,” with the stiff look he wore when his pain got worse or when he had to talk about feelings. “Before that respected colleagues at least. I would hope you would trust me to be civil in any response, even if my reaction would not be what you – this hypothetical version of you that we are positing – that you hoped for.” He frowned, and actually did look a little insulted. “It is not as though I’d react with disgust.”

Newt stared at him.

He flicked his eyes away quickly, scanning the wall. Eyes, eyes were weird. He should just think about every component part of eyes. Vitreous jelly! He could sing odes. “Well,” Newt said, “anyway, anyway,” and Hermann put his hand on his and he slammed his mouth shut fast enough his teeth clicked together. 

Hermann said anxiously, “Surely you wouldn’t expect me to react in a close-minded fashion simply because of, of our initial dislike when we finally met each other, the judgments I made—Newton, it’s been twenty years!”

Newt attempted a cool and calm laugh. Hermann narrowed his eyes. “You’re making way too big a deal of this,” Newt said. He twitched his fingers restlessly. Hermann’s hand felt warm on his. “It’s not a big thing. Hypotheticals. Like you said. Damn you and your scenarios! Haha. But come on, you’ve been disgusted by me plenty.”

“Newton,” Hermann said, scowling.

Newt scowled at him right back. He didn’t get to erase their history, just leave the board clear and empty and sanitized of the messier parts. Newt wasn’t an equation that had gone wrong. “My morals,” Newt said, and rolled his arms, as much as he could. “My _tats_.”

Hermann rested his finger on Newt’s wrist tenderly, as he glared daggers at him. “Entirely reasonable objections,” he said, “and hardly made often enough that you would extrapolate—”

“Don’t tell me what I’m thinking!” Newt snapped. “As though infrequent data doesn’t – listen, that doesn’t matter.” He swiped his fingers through the air irritably. “Not just that, but my work, every day, _Newton, get your disgusting subjects off my side of the lab, Newton, clean up that viscera, Newton, clean your microscope_ and okay when I put it like that it just sounds like you being usual adorable tidy self but the thing is, you don’t like my work. You just don’t. Bloody and messy and not as _perfect_ as numbers, right?” Hermann stared at him like he’d turned into a kaiju right in front of him, or turned into a stranger, and shook his head, like he still didn’t get it, and Newt sort of shrugged a bit. “And my work is, me, so—”

Hermann’s grip tightened on his hand. “That is one of the greatest errors we can commit as scientists,” he said softly, quickly, trying to quiet him, as if Newt had ever been hushable. “To conflate ourselves with our work. Newton, you’re more than—”

“I am literally _made of biology_ ,” Newt shouted. “It is _kind of inside us_.” Hermann’s eyes flicked to the window in slight alarm, and Newt in irritation pulled his fingers back, seeing as he couldn’t really pull his hand away. But at even the slight motion, the indication Hermann’s hand was unwelcome there, Hermann drew his hand back. Newt scowled at it furiously, more or less at random: he could name the bones in the fingers, not just Hermann’s own elegant tapered scholar’s graceful fucking hands but anyone’s, universally, the underlying tendons and tensions beneath. “Not just me, dude! All of us!”

Hermann sat quite still. Newt slumped back in his seat after his tirade, puffing a little from shouting. Chest heaving up and down. Hardworking little alveoli, aww. His body did his best with what Newt put it through.

He ran over what he’d just said, and gaped at Hermann. Hermann visibly braced himself. People could stop acting like he was a stormfront about to trample over them really any time now. 

“I’m a biologist,” Newt said in slight wonder. “Huh. Wow.”

Hermann eyed him warily. “Yes, Newt. I’m hardly going to argue with that.”

“I just …” Newt said, slowly, trying to work it out. “Kind of … forgot?”

Not really. Forgot was too simple a word, too misleading, he knew who he was, what he was, it wasn’t like he’d ever not known, especially when his skillset was of use. He had made kaiju, replicated the needed parts. But the love hadn’t been there to accompany it, the joy that normally fizzed in his chest when he spoke. Like pulling a rug over a stain.

He stretched out his fingers, hesitantly. After a second, without making eye contact, Hermann placed his hand in his. Human hands. Human, human. Contemptible and small. _No_. Miracle and mischance. _Tiny as ants, swarming, insignificant, feeble._

It truly felt alien. An incursion, now he noticed. Trying to end the world still felt plenty like him, felt just a bit like something he wanted, but the contempt for humans, that wasn’t from him, that could never be. The cracks where another philosophy had been soldered on were starting to show. 

“How the hell did they manage to make me hate biology?” Newt said, staring at their interlinking hands, the press of skin to skin: the sheer physical fact of tactility, and oh, he was really starting to understand why the Precursors had tried to keep him away from Hermann.

One corner of Hermann’s mouth drew up, and then the other. “Impermanently.”

Newt glanced sidelong at the mirrored glass of one wall and discretely gave it the finger. He wished it could just be the two of them here for this. “Hermann, I’m gonna say something, and if you use this for blackmail our esteemed bickering career is over for ever.”

Hermann tensed just slightly, leaning forward. “Yes?”

“I really need your help.”

Hermann’s tongue poked at one corner of his mouth, clearly amused, and Newt didn’t stare too long, hopefully. Hermann said, “I am not going to argue with that either.”

“I want you to help me,” Newt said, struggling. “Just to know what’s – what’s real – Hermann, I want to be, I’ve gotta be better.” To be free. To be someone who deserved to know the exact shape of Hermann’s hands, the calluses where he held his pen. Who deserved to see Mako. To study and fight. He struggled to find words for any of it. Ended up with, “I really want to be able to argue with you in a full range of motion.”

Hermann squeezed his hand, and nodded. “I want that too,” he said, and then let out a shaky breath. Newt had to do his best not to panic as Hermann canted forward, like an unsteady ship at sea, and pressed their foreheads together blindly. Like Newt wasn’t the only one who needed it.

The Precursors whispered of surging forward, his head like a battering ram, Hermann’s brain so fragile and full of easily destroyed potential. _Nonono_. He rebelled against it, of course, obviously, hurting Hermann was far more against his nature than building beautiful monsters or calling down destruction to an abstract version of the world.

But to be proved at last better than him, to succeed, to win …

Newt kind of stroked his thumb along Hermann’s fingers. “Precursors really want you out of the way, buddy,” he said carefully.

Hermann shifted backward, but only a little. “They’re scared,” Hermann said, and gave him a bright, blinding grin, and Newt kissed him again, as himself, Newt kissed him.

He only did it for a second. Okay, maybe a few seconds, because Hermann’s lips parted in shock and his mouth was warm, and Newt meant to pull back but he had to kiss the corner of his mouth, he just had to, but he pulled back after that, he was good.

Hermann stared at him, lifting a hand to his mouth. His fingers touched lightly against his mouth. He didn’t yell at him or anything. A second ago he’d been grinning and now he wasn’t.

Newt shrunk into himself a bit. Hermann’s eyes were a mute question. “Yeah, that was me,” Newt said. “I mean, I wanted to. But if you don’t that’s totally cool, I know I’m—”

Hermann kissed him back.

He pulled back way too soon, too, and Newt rolled his eyes in agitation at the door. He didn’t want to waste any time when maybe Jake would come in any moment when he saw this. He would need to get Hermann to free him first, so they could fight Jake together, and. Nnnope, how about no. His mind was fraying to pieces, but Hermann was still so close to him he could practically feel his warmth.

“I’m afraid I must ask why, however,” Hermann said, and Newt gave a casual little laugh. Hermann frowned. “Are you quite alright?”

“Oh, fine, fine. You know. I’ve been in love with you since forever?”

A restless seething in his mind, but he stayed up, up above it, he would not let the waves reach him today: Hermann had kissed back. Hermann said slowly, “You … you never told me.”

Newt shook his head, violently, vigorous. Surely he didn’t have to explain something so obvious. “Way too unacceptable a risk,” he said.

Hermann settled back unsteadily in his seat, then tugged it closer forward, grimacing, the chair scraping over the floor. “Newton, you drifted with a kaiju brain.”

Newt really didn’t get his point. “Yeah?”

Hermann sighed, his put-upon sigh that made Newt want both to kiss him more and tear all his papers in half to annoy him. “Even you, with your differing background, surely have to recognize that is a … very considerably higher risk.”

“Yeah, but this would’ve meant losing you,” Newt said.

Hermann stared at him.

Then he stood up again, dropping his cane, and grabbed Newt’s face painfully hard and kissed him. He lessened his grip a moment after, carefully. Newt made an agreeable sort of noise into his mouth, in hopes of encouraging everything about this very nice behavior.

Hermann pulled back just far enough that Newt could still feel his breath on his face. “I fear being pulled irreparably into you,” Hermann whispered.

A staggeringly vast thing to be told, from someone like Hermann, not that Newt was going to mention how he’d kind of slotted Hermann into the role of his own personal sun, so Newt could keep track of the shadows, extrapolate the true shape of things. He blurted, “That’s a stupid thing to be scared of, dude!”

Hermann laughed, and pressed their foreheads together. Newt was cool with that. Braincuddles, practically. 

Love was a weakness, a human weakness, something that could be exploited. Newt shook his head a very little, just a fraction, just for himself. _Drifts go both ways_ , he all but shouted in his mind.

And there was a hint of what might have been fear, and then rapid clamoring of agreement: a human weakness, yes, his own, something that could be used to pull him free from them: he must hurt Hermann stop Hermann drive Hermann off – no, never, never – but –

His mind blazed painfully with blue, and Newt tensed, trying to fight it, and Hermann pulled backward, though his hand still cupped Newt’s face.

“Yeah, that’s still a thing,” Newt said carefully. Speaking, doing anything right now felt like holding himself exactly steady after too much drinking, perfectly alright until swaying too far in any one direction made the world shatter into pieces and his guts flip inside out.

“We can try again,” Hermann said. “Later.”

Newt nodded.

“And I’m going to get you out of there,” Hermann said. Newt didn’t nod. But you know, he nearly believed it? 

 

 

 

“You don’t need to save the whole world by yourself, Doctor Gottlieb,” Maria said.

Hermann told her, “We stand on the shoulders of giants.”

Jake assigned him a whole lab for his portion of the work. His steps sounded out too loudly. On the second day he snapped and rearranged his blackboards and the available monitors to obscure half the room, he was that thrown off by the empty space.

He spent most of his time there, when he wasn’t trying to salvage what was left of Newton. Occasionally he’d find himself responding to remarks that had not been said. Fragments of drift-memory, as clear as if Newt was standing right by his shoulder and criticizing his conclusions. Hermann always turned to an empty room.

Few things could be disproven, only proven. Was there any way to be certain who was a sleeper agent until they woke? Hermann’s mind had always been his tool and best weapon, and now he feared seeping rot. A flaw in the code.

A proper theory was evenly stacked. Each new claim rested solidly upon the shoulders of that which had come before, with nothing built that might be risked to fault lines. This was as close as humans could come to creating something immovable: towers built up, up towards the heavens. Hermann scrawled endless equations on his room full of whiteboards, then scrubbed them clean, began again, until his hands were stained with marker ink and his sleeves dusty with chalkdust. He talked to Maria once a week, grateful on this occasion to yield to an expert: neurology was not his field. He was glad of having outside eyes vigilantly monitoring his mental state, in case any faults began to show, any breaches. Sometimes he had awkward lunches with Pentecost. And every day, he talked to Newton.

Newt was the devastating and most precious part of his days. That part hadn’t changed at all.

Early on, before Mako’s return and the corresponding resurgence in Hermann’s tentative belief in miracles, Newt said, “I’m not surprised they’re worshipping me.”

Hermann twitched. 

He weighed the folly of giving Newton any information against the need to correct him. Accuracy won. “I’d hardly say worshipping,” he said. “From what I gathered of their rantings you were, ah, closer to the marginalia than anything else. They simply attempted this because you’re the only living relic relevant to their faith.”

“Prophet works,” Newt said. Some days he did not speak, or bit his tongue until Hermann had to leave to find guards or just sit there, helplessly, as blood ran down his chin. Sometimes Newt spoke endlessly and fluidly and thoughtlessly, branching into tangents. Even more than he used to. “I’m, you know, an envoy. Terraformer.” Hermann sketched an elliptical course beside his notes, tried not to look too interested. This was extremely vital information for anyone who had the patience and the intelligence to sort through Newt’s rantings and find the points of influence. “Well,” Newt said thoughtfully, switching track at once, and Hermann added a satellite on a corresponding orbit. “That doesn’t sound right, it can’t be terraforming unless the goal is to make the planet earth-like. What would that make me?”

The slow, looping circles calmed him. “Not an etymologist,” Hermann said.

“Anteformer,” Newt said, and Hermann sighed. At the sound, Newt’s eyes fixed Hermann went carefully still. Newt laughed. “But we know you’re anti-form, right? You favor function?”

Slow, well-paced breaths, to stay within his body and the present moment. Everything fitted into the place it should. Hermann labelled his diagram, graphite smudging against the paper, the same set of stationery he’d carried with him since TU.

He did not quite dare to look at Newt. “Some things manage with both,” he said.

“Not gods,” Newt announced. Hermann breathed carefully out through his nose. He was manic. Wonderful. “It’s all in the promises, man, the uh, the teachings? Are there teachings? I really don’t know what humans are expecting to get out of this. _Precursor_ , that really is the best word, I’m one, too, practically. Harbinger of nothing good, right, Herms?” He grinned at him.

Hermann carefully laid his pencil down and fetched out the worn eraser. His diagram needed neatening. “All I know is any religion featuring you in even a minor spot is doomed from the start.”

“Come on,” Newt said, feverishly animated. “Wasn’t my plan, obviously, but I should get at least some credit.” He pushed against his bonds impatiently. Medics did treat his chafed sores, but in Hermann’s opinion at least fifty percent less than would be ideal for his continued health. “You liked my big guy? The fusion tech was genius.”

Hermann’s eraser went wide of its mark, and he gripped it tighter. “I took the liberty of calling it Threefold,” he said, looking up at Newt, and Newt beamed. “It terrified me,” Hermann said truthfully. Newt stopped beaming.

Newt lolled back in his chair, sulking. It was hard to draw dividing lines: to say this was Newt as he would be, and this the influence of corruption. The chaos made Hermann’s mind itch. He could not throw banks of monitors in front of it or prod the messier parts of Precursor-Newton over the line of tape. Sulking in an argument was precisely what Newt would do.

Newt sniffed. “Just like you to be hurtful about it,” he said. He heaved a sigh. “I thought I’d expanded your tiny little mind a little, but—”

“I wasn’t scared because it was a kaiju, Newton,” Hermann said. It was hard at times to be patient and not fair that he always had to be, but he was the one with the capacity, and thus. “I know they can be … beautiful. I was scared because it was a machine made for death, and my best friend made it.”

Newt stared at him, and then swallowed. He shook his head, blinking. “Hey, Hermann.”

“Hello, Newton.”

“How long have you been here?”

Crisis event one after another they had survived, and Hermann had never heard him scared as often as he did these days.

Hermann fixed his linework, and turned to the next page. He was relatively sure Newt couldn’t pass along information unless the Precursor presence was actually there, though not certain enough to risk writing anything specific. “Not long,” Hermann said. Newt smiled at him, statistically almost certainly a real smile, and Hermann shifted his aching leg and smiled back. 

One piece and then the next, conclusions built upon solid ground, up, up.

In his dreams the rearing kaiju plotted out in graphite against smudged color cities were interspersed strangely with the inevitable motion of planets, measured, stately. He had been thinking often, lately, of orbits. Sometimes they mingled with a child’s, a boy’s dream of spaceflight.

Newt was fighting. Inside one prison placed concentric within another, he was fighting.

When Hermann first saw Mako Mori after her return he forgot all protocol, stood up as straight as he could and impulsively saluted. She was battered, bruised, impossibly human. When she saluted back he nearly fell over from the surprise of it, and could not stop smiling, that day.

And some days he could barely make himself rise from bed to continue his work, the weight of it all seemed so crushing, so utterly pointless. His sheets trapped him and above that the invisible pulse of pain and then the layers and layers of metal of the base, and then their brittle atmosphere, so carefully balanced, and it felt like he was suffocating. Hermann noted the variables. He carried on.

Sometimes after the official meetings, there were unofficial ones, gathered wearily around the table with nothing to share but their headaches and the half-bottles of vodka Jake seemed to produce from the ether. It would be churlish to refuse the offer of companionship. Newt, certainly, would have enjoyed it. 

Hermann was flattered to be part of the war council, though of course his breach model was integral to any kind of sensible opposition, the kind Jake wanted. Still, he was compromised, one half of a package deal that included a man currently – he had checked – asleep only through the aid of doubtfully moral sedation, as the Precursors, perhaps sensing control slipping, had forced him to scream until flecks of blood came from his mouth. When Lambert poured the shots of vodka Hermann snatched his faster than he might’ve normally.

“It must be precise,” Mako said again, staring into her shot glass soberly. “It must,” she repeated, and it was a privilege, in a way, to be able to see her at her bleakest, not putting on a front. “We are better than civilian casualties. To get in, target those that have targeted us and leave again without further loss of life. That is how it must be done.”

Liwen Shao was not as crisply intimidating as she had first seemed, but her posture was flawless, rigidly immaculate, not unwinding an inch. “Drones are adequate,” Shao said. “They will nearly eliminate the risk of loss of human life, if we give them the chance.” She was staring daggers at Mako.

Hermann, having taken the merest sip of vodka, coughed over the burn. “If you’ll pardon me,” he said, dabbing at his mouth. “The risk of breaking the interface at astronomical distances—”

“We know about space,” Jake said. He looked more relaxed than anyone else here, dressing gown draped over his uniform, voice loud and boisterous and at odds with the seriousness of his expression. “You’ve talked plenty about space. Say anything else about space and I get to confiscate your drink, get it?”

“I merely …” Hermann began, and Jake made a grab at the air between them, though he was clear across the table. Hermann curled around his drink reflexively. “Yes, sir,” he muttered. He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to drink it, but then, it was good to have the option.

“I will pilot Titan Avenger,” said Mako, in the tone of voice that left no arguing with her. Jake grinned a bit, just quickly, then swallowed down his second shot.

The name change was one of the few things they had been able to agree upon during the meeting. Some traditions were not worth keeping, were best put quietly away, to better go forward. 

“You shall need a copilot,” Hermann said, and then flushed at the obviousness of the remark. Newt would be utterly charming, if he were here, Newt would fill in all the holes in Hermann’s conversation. Proper Newt, the old Newt. Current Newt would try to poison Mako’s drink, he reflected, sourly.

Mako nodded serenely. Lambert and Jake did not look at each other. Jake coughed, covering his face with one hand, then lowering it. “For the other jaegers we’ll send, the cadets are coming along pretty well,” he said, and Lambert nodded, but Mako shook her head.

“I still hold hope that more veteran pilots will respond to the call,” she said. She grimaced. “There is no need to resort to child soldiers.”

“It’s what Dad did to us,” Jake snapped.

All down the table silence fell. Shao tapped at her phone, lips pressed together: avoiding an awkward situation or perhaps perfecting some piece of her revolutionary code, Hermann had sincerely no idea. 

Seeing those two fight would, at least, give some idea of their drift compatibility, but Mako’s eyes showed no anger, only more sorrow. “In war,” she said at last. Not as though it had taken her a long time to think of it, but as though it had been worth waiting to get the words right. 

“What all the kids in the world need right now is not to be in war,” Jake said tiredly.

“I agree,” Mako said. Jake after a moment pushed his untouched third shot across the table to her, and she smiled, though she didn’t drink it. She looked across at Hermann. “We will need information,” she said. Quite kindly.

At that he lifted his shot in a hand that did not shake and tipped back his head to down it, coughing into his sleeve after. He could handle his drink. It had just been a while since he had any time, any time or patience at all for such vices. “I know.”

Mako was not cruel, but not the kind of person to easily relent. “Will you be able to give it?”

Hermann did his best effort at half a bow, seated as he was. “My skills are at your disposal,” he said. Leaving her real question quite ignored.

He was not sure what to do.

Two drives pulled him in two opposing directions. To lend every fraction of intelligence and determination he possessed towards the quest to save his planet, and to retrieve the man he loved from the maw of monsters. 

The forces were nearly equal, and on one level it shamed him that his personal feelings for Newton so easily rivalled his obligation to an entire planet, to each person on it. But he had done what was right, when it was necessary. Hermann would do what was right. If he had to choose between Newt and the world, by prior evidence he knew what he would choose.

The theory he tried endlessly and stubbornly to put into practice was that he did not need to choose between them at all.

His theory was not well-constructed. Not plausible. Not safe. He hung grimly on. He worked until his head ached, and his leg, and his heart, and he took rest and solace where he could find it.

Newton kissed him, and it was not Newt, and Newt would never want to: a sobering reminder, and selfishly a cause of great anguish. Immediately following the incident, more days were weighed down than usual. The forces pushing down on him felt inarguable as gravity. 

And then Newton kissed him, and it was own self, and Hermann kissed him back, and oh, that changed the equation.

For weeks he had been a particle in the three-body problem, circumbinary to his two undeniable drives.

But Hermann himself could be a fixed point. Especially now he had Newton back, when they always functioned best in the same space. He could draw Newt back from his own dividing forces with the effect of his existence in this world. He could give their strike the precision aim it would need to soar through the stars. Hermann could redefine the factors.

He fought gravity every day anyway.


	6. Chapter 6

Newton’s small cell was crowded with this many people. Newton, and Hermann standing near him but not too close, lest it seemed unscientific. Mako Mori, Jake Pentecost, Jules Reyes. Shiwen Lao had not yet visited Newt, which was perhaps understandable, and perhaps for the best.

Hermann cleared his throat. Newton snickered a little behind him, and Hermann realized his stiff and upright posture might indeed make him seem self-important. He resisted the urge to glare at Newt anyway. “Thank you, everybody,” he said. He attempted a smile. “I know it may be disconcerting to be in here, but I assure you, Newton has made leaps and bounds in his rehabilitation.”

“Metaphorically,” Newt chimed in, from his chair. Hermann gave in to the urge to roll his eyes at him.

“We could take him,” Jules said. She watched Newt with unrestrained curiosity.

Hermann nodded to them all. “I assure you, I wouldn’t waste your time. The goal we work towards is very important. Newton can help.” He waved at the group and said, “Tell them what you told me.”

Newt shrugged. “Sure, okay,” he said and looked at them all. He drew in a deep breath. “Hermann completes me. Really. Not that I’m not whole, actually I’m a bit too much whole, that’s the problem, but what I mean is even in the bad times I felt better just knowing he was out there, in the world, being him. He has the cutest smile in the world? He kisses like he has to focus to get it perfect—”

Hermann tapped his cane urgently against Newt’s knee. Newt stopped and gave him a quizzical look. 

“Not that,” Hermann said. He could feel his face burning, the uneven splotchy blush he hated and that Newt would probably have listed as another of his charms if Hermann let him continue. He rigidly did not look at anyone, but he still couldn’t avoid seeing Jake Pentecost give him a small thumbs up.

Newt smiled at him. Hermann wondered a moment if he had deliberately misinterpreted in order to embarrass him with praise.

“Yeah, hey, gang,” Newt said, turning ahead. He had to strain to shift his head to keep them all in view, bound as he was, and Hermann felt a pang. Newt flared his fingers in a wave. “Hey Mako! Okay, so: I want to help. Now, I hear what you’re saying, this Newt guy’s a genius but still compromised, right? And yeah, absolutely, it’s not just me in here. But we’re pretty sure, and we still need to study it, so don’t take my word for that, but we’re pretty sure it’s a ghost effect by now, getting weaker all the time because Herms was genius enough to cut me off from Alice. Anyway let’s not get into that. I want to help.”

A typically Newton style of declaration, rambling and not to the point, but it wasn’t as though anyone would believe it if Hermann spoke for him. Hermann looked worriedly at the people in front of him. He clenched his cane tight to avoid the urge to fidget.

“How about you give us your intel, and we decide whether to use it,” Jake said.

Newt winced. “I mean, it’s good intel, so you really should—” Hermann shifted towards him, and Newt cut himself off quickly. “I mean yes boss, sure boss.” 

Mako took a step closer, her face intent and serious. Hermann did not dare let himself hope yet.

Newt leaned forward, speaking quick and earnest. “The thing you want,” he said, “a, a population center, military center, I don’t know, they don’t really have that. They’re a hive mind, there isn’t like, a war council. You can’t defang them like cutting the stinger off a scorpion, not that you should do that, just an example, because it’s, it’s stingers all the way down? Or it’s a million scorpions, not just the one. Kind of both those things? So I can’t help with that. If there’s a weak point they didn’t show me it, why would they?”

“Yeah, good intel,” Jake drawled. 

“Hey, let me _finish_ ,” Newt said. Hermann pressed his eyes closed for a moment. He opened them and gave Newt an anxious glance, Newt pale, sweaty, his antagonism not hiding the way his hands clenched tight with fear, the restless jitter of his legs. “That can’t work. But I can tell you how to open a Breach. To get at them.”

Mako’s eyes widened just a fraction.

There was silence, otherwise: not even Jake Pentecost had a swift reply to that. Newt swallowed. “If … when you trust me,” he said. Hermann gave up on his thin lie of impartial distance, and leaned over to squeeze his shoulder. Newt’s mouth curbed up.

“Not that I’m not happy to save the world with you, Geiszler,” Jake said, with a nod, and he seemed to mean it. He added more dryly, “We need any help we can get. But how can we trust you? Even if you think you’re telling the truth you might not be.”

Newton shrugged. “Classic dilemma,” he said. “Sure.” He looked pained, fraught. He had laid himself bare, over and over, and Hermann was angry at Jake even if it made little sense to be: how could they not see Newton had done enough. “We were hoping even if you don’t believe me, you’d believe my partner. In the lab. My lab partner. To find a way of verification at least, because I get that, I do.”

Hermann stepped forward. “There is drifting,” he said. He glanced at Jules. “At some stage I would appreciate help with the interface I’m working on, if anyone is free. At this present time, it is still an unwise risk. But we cannot afford to waste a resource …” He did not quite look at Newt, but swallowed, and met Jake’s eyes. “To imprison a good man, waiting until we can prove he can be trusted. The truth is there is no certain proof I have found yet, and though I will keep searching, no one here has endless time. Even if the technology were fully functioning, it is not as though things can’t be obscured. Newton went without detection for a long time.”

Newt’s face looked thin and unhappy, and Hermann’s list of regrets threatened to rob him of his breath. Keep going. He knew his course. 

“In the long term I would like to propose a comprehensive treatment plan consisting of neurological and medical analysis, every possible resource for recovery made available and of course regular psychological assessment,” Hermann said, and Newt made an indignant noise. “… With consultation. For the moment, I believe there is a way to prove at least intent.”

“You’re not that convincing so far,” Jules said bluntly. Jake nudged his elbow into hers, and she frowned at him, and added, “So I hope so.”

He had calculated what would be best for everyone, how his two necessary outcomes would best be weighed against each other, and he had plotted it out on those sleepless nights, down to a decimal point. Still, it ached. Hermann cleared his throat awkwardly and shuffled a little closer to Newt. “Newton … I will understand if you don’t forgive me.”

Newt frowned up at him. “I’ll always forgive you, my man.”

Difference in height as well as everything else was too much. Hermann hooked his stool over to him and sat down on it heavily. He looked at Newt from there, as nearly equals, and said, “Do you wish to know the number of deaths, both of military personnel and civilians, caused either directly or indirectly by the actions you took while possessed?”

“Yes,” Newt whispered.

Hermann told him. 

Newt’s face went slack with shock. “Oh,” he said, nearly inaudible. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, fuck, no, no.” He started crying, still staring at Hermann, eyes begging for reassurances Hermann did not have. Hermann could only give a tiny shake of his head. “Oh, fuck, no, oh fuck,” Newt whimpered. “How many were – kids, that’s – no don’t tell me don’t tell me – tell me,” and his voice broke and he wept. He hunched into his shoulders, clearly uncomfortable, but lacking the capacity to curl into himself. He drew in gulping breaths, shuddering, and at last gasped out, “The Precursors had no right! They had no right!”

His eyes streamed with tears, running freely down his face, mingling with snot from his nose as he sobbed harder, hoarse and desperate. All this long time, as far as Hermann could tell, Newt had not felt the fullest weight of his emotions before, and now he did. Hermann balled his hand into an anxious fist when the first drops of red mingled with the tears.

He glanced to the other observers, because yes, he could be ruthless. Mako’s eyes were lowered, respectful. Jake pawed through his pocket, and slightly helplessly pulled out a balled-up tissue.

Hermann nodded and rose stiffly to his feet. “If that’s all, I would like it if we can get this man out of his restraints, please,” he said, and stepped to Newt. Newt leaned towards him, and Hermann swallowed and wrapped an arm around him, tight, fitting it around his shoulders as best he could. He buried his face in Newt’s hair a moment, and lifted it back up only reluctantly. “And to some rest,” Hermann said, hearing the strain in his own voice, “and then every brain scan we can think of that he consents to. Please.”

Newt held on tight to him as he wept. Only a drop or two of blood had come from his nose: dilute, they made his lip a grisly pinkish color. 

Hermann put his sleeve to Newt’s face to mop up the worst of it. Newt clung to him and unashamedly cried. Mako bowed her head and left. 

“I am so sorry,” Hermann said, just for his ears. “Forgive me.” For doing this to him or for not doing it earlier getting him free before this, he did not know. “My friend, I am sorry.” In that moment words failed him as they so often did.

Newt sniffed, and pulled back enough to blink blearily at him. “It’s okay—Listen to me, for once, you beautiful sexy jackass, didn’t I already,” but he was crying too hard for the rest to be understood, crying and clinging to him, and Hermann held him tight while Newt’s body shook wholeheartedly with his tears. This was him, entirely him. That reassured, in some distant way: no one could doubt the devastating sincerity of his grief and misplaced guilt, or his entirely legitimate fury. Jake nodded to them and left, too, Jules walking after him talking fast. It was good. This was the outcome he had sought.

For all that this was his plan, Hermann’s chest felt tight and unpleasant, his breathing coming only with difficulty, and he did not know what to do, and so he held him.

After a while the flood of tears lessened. Newt still held tight to him, but less like he was drowning and more like he wanted to be held. And Hermann held him.

Words failed him, but his body did not. For this it did not.

Jules came back, brisk, all business. Ranger Lambert accompanied her, looking stiff and disapproving. “You’ve got the go ahead,” Jules said, and looked at Newt. “But keep an eye on him.”

Newton’s head was still nestled close to his chest, making Hermann feel a little less desolately sorry, and Hermann calculated the viability of merely remaining like this for at least the next few hours, or years. “I will do that anyway.”

“Weirdo,” Newt said. Hermann patted gently at his hair.

Quick and businesslike Jules knelt and undid the bonds on Newt’s feet. Then his hands. “Don’t push yourself too hard,” she informed him, and glanced at Hermann. “We can talk about that interface later. Doesn’t need to be as complicated if you’re not piloting a jaeger, but all bridges need to be well built.”

Hermann nodded to her, as a respected colleague. She left, and Lambert left a moment after. Leaving them alone. There was some certain degree of trust to that, although maybe everyone had simply grown tired of Hermann’s insistences, and did not count it too much of a loss if Newton broke his neck.

Newt lifted one arm then the other, flexing his fingers and wincing, rolling his shoulders. “Bodies are the worst,” he said, and then touched the fingers of one hand to one of his tattoos, tracing the lines curiously. “Uh, sorry man, and this’ll be awkward, but you might have to help me walk.” 

“Only to the medical bay,” Hermann retorted. Newt groaned.

“Fine, for a start—”

“And then I’ll take you home,” Hermann said, much quieter, because he was unable to find the courage to say that very loudly, with the question it brought.

Newt folded into him like a startled bird seeking sanctuary. “Oh,” he said in a squeak. “I hope you have kleenex. I mean for the crying! The crying! Okay, okay so you want to move in with me. Is that as … friends, or boyfriends? Partners I mean, whatever.”

Hermann held out his hand carefully, and for a moment was afraid when Newt did not move a muscle, but maybe he was just rusty at moving, at having range of movement again. Hermann looked forward to the arguments they would have. After that pause that felt like forever Newt surged his hand forward so it gripped Hermann’s, and Hermann squeezed it in some relief. He kissed Newt’s wrist impulsively. “You have been through so much,” Hermann said, “and I do not wish to reshape you into something meant for me. We can be either, friend or …” He stammered it only a little. “Boyfriend. I am – quite excessively in love with you. But we can be whichever you’d like.”

Newt hummed, and pushed himself to his feet. He grimaced, sweat springing to his forehead. Hermann mentally planned a route to his cane, then down the hall: manageable pieces of impossibility. Newt leaned his weight into him, and then leaned his head against him, practically nuzzling his neck. The motion held more of exhaustion than sensual intent.

“Both,” Newt said. “What’s a little ambiguity between friendboyfriends.” He looped Hermann a tired grin. “Perfectly possible to exist in multiple states, right? Multitudes.”

Hermann put an arm around his shoulder, and promised, with just a trace of cockiness that was not originally his, “I can manage as many dimensions as you need.” 

 

 

 

Newt figured someone had pulled some strings to get Hermann this apartment, right at the bottom of the tower stack. It wasn’t big by any means, but they each had a room, and Hermann had his own office and Newt a makeshift one set up in one corner of the living room, because it was important to have separate space. 

Inevitably they both migrated till it turned into a shared research lab in the living room, stepping around each other’s work, lying down dividing lines that were ignored. They pushed and pulled into each other’s space, bleeding out through the edges, knocking elbows against each other and sharing coffee mugs. Sometimes Newt or Hermann would retreat to a corner and the other would allow it: most often they would argue, fight, kiss, or go half a day without talking but side by side, legs pressed together.

When the lift worked, they took it up to the roof to look at the stars. Hermann liked that. Newt liked carrying the basket and blanket and thermos, small marks of trust, even if he shifted them restlessly between his hands on the lift ride up. When they lay near the building’s edge Hermann circled his fingers loosely around Newt’s wrist, just a little like a manacle. He tried not to resent it.

“I have been thinking often of orbital motion,” Hermann told him one morning over the newspaper.

Newt laughed into his orange juice. “Of course you have,” he said, “nerd. Carry on though.” He kicked Hermann under the table, when Hermann looked embarrassed. “Hey, I didn’t say it wasn’t hot.”

Hermann folded the newspaper down and gave him a look, blinking. “Are you saying that it is?”

“I’m not saying anything,” Newt said, and mimed zipping his mouth shut, and throwing away the key, though not very far away. “You’re telling me about orbital motion.”

Hermann sniffed, and pulled his cup of tea closer. It was his first for the day. Newt’s fifth glass of orange juice. He hadn’t actually got around to sleeping yet. “It seemed the best metaphor for you, and I, for my feelings for you,” Hermann said. He took a precise sip of his tea, and muttered into it without looking at him, “To fall endlessly into you and miss. To ever be falling.”

Newt scuffed his foot against his chair leg and smiled at him. His heart was vast, like, he actually thought it might’ve expanded in the past few days from all of Hermann’s shy kisses and handholding and declarations of love, like, he kind of wanted to carve into his own chest and take his feelings out to categorize them properly. He wouldn’t. Obviously. He didn’t have anything as good to say back, though. “Babe!” he said, and Hermann flushed unevenly, coughing into his tea.

“Ah,” Hermann said, emerging, and patted at his mouth. “But … I think we are closer to two stars orbiting the same barycenter.”

Newton leaned over the table, smiling at him. He took his hand, tracing his fingers playfully over the interesting jut of Hermann’s wrist. “Ooh, keep saying _barycenter_.”

“Go to bed, Newton.”

He did, for a few hours, but on the couch: the nightmares weren’t as bad if Hermann was nearby. Listening to him mutter to himself was utterly soothing.

He woke up in the early evening and yawned, rubbing at his back as he sat up. Picking up his empty glass, he dropped it in the sink so Hermann wouldn’t get on his back about it later. Hermann’s papers were tidied, which meant he was in his room. Newt stretched again, and walked to the door.

Before he could reach it Hermann lurched out of his room, cane clenched in one hand, eyes wide. “Newton,” he said. “Where are you going?”

Newt stopped for a second, puzzled. He needed some air. “Just out,” he said.

Hermann stepped between him and the door, eyes wide. His hands were half held-up as if to ward him off.

Newt scowled at him and took a step forward. Hermann said, “Unless you get a little more specific, and accept accompaniment, I can’t let you do that.”

Newt laughed: this was silly, he just wanted to go – upstairs, go and look at the stars, yes, the image was clear as day. “Herms, you’re not my jailkeeper,” he said.

Hermann frowned, eyes tracking down his arms. Newt looked too and realized that his own fists were clenched. He stared at them, then looked up, as Hermann tasered him. 

He woke up a while later, brain lurching like soup in a bowl. The rest of him didn’t feel great either. Hermann had an arm around him, which was nice, and Newt puzzled through what he was doing until it made sense: Hermann was helping him up, gasping roughly as he heaved him onto a chair.

Hermann stepped back and wiped his stupid handkerchief across his forehead. His face was red with exertion. Newt stared up at him. He didn’t have enough breath to speak, but this was important. “Have you just,” he gasped out. “Been carrying a taser this whole time.” 

Hermann nodded, breath short. “I do apologize for the risk, but it seemed necessary. I would not win in a physical fight. Well.” He hooked the other chair over to him and sat down on it neatly. “Not without both of us being hurt, which the world can hardly afford.” Newt loved it when he talked with the confidence he’d so entirely earned, matter-of-fact about his own irreplaceability. Newt, though, no. 

“Respect,” Newt said automatically. He frowned. Hermann being fully prepared to take him down if he went evil gladdened Newt’s heart and definitely turned him on just a bit, but he felt sinking, too, hollow. He wished he hadn’t needed to.

Also his nerves were tingling a bit, lingering effects from being shocked. Maybe it was that which made him feel at a distance from his own body, like he was watching the scene as an outside observer. Then again, maybe not.

He hadn’t even noticed that they were taking him outside. Completely automated like a rogue jaeger, like he wasn’t the pilot of this thing.

Newt looked across at Hermann, who gave him a hesitant smile. “You should just tie me up,” Newt said. 

Hermann blinked and pulled his glasses up over his face, to frown at him thoughtfully through them. “Perhaps, but not in this context. You don’t need to—”

Newt flung up his hand hastily. “Wait, backtrack for a second—”

“I don’t know if we should sidetrack from something that seems to be of great concern to you,” Hermann said, sensibly, damn him for resisting his wiles.

Or maybe Newt’s wiles just weren’t up to snuff. “This shouldn’t be on you, Herms, not if we don’t know when it’ll end.” Brainscans so far were fascinating, but they asked more questions than they answered, and for once he wanted answers more than questions. Hermann wouldn’t even let Newt look at his, even when e pouted. “They should just put me back there, or in some other cell somewhere.” He sucked on his lip, and could not quite manage to be as brave as he wanted. “—With books this time, obviously, there should be laws about that.”

Herman leaned his cane against the table, a faint click of wood against wood. “Newton. This really isn’t necessary.”

“Yeah, agreed, man, same wavelength,” Newt said, and waved between his head and Hermann’s. “I mean metaphorically.”

Hermann sighed. “I mean that it is – it is no trouble,” he said. His voice was stilted, awkward, and just because that wasn’t quite what Hermann sounded like when he was trying to lie didn’t mean it was true. “Don’t work yourself into a panic over nothing. I’m happy to have you here.”

“You are a _genius_ ,” Newt snapped. Hermann opened his mouth then slowly closed it again. Yeah, Newt didn’t normally throw that at him in their arguments. Newt stood up because he could, and paced around the table, waving at him. “You’re a genius scientist trying to save the world. You’ve got better things to do than babysit.”

Had it been this morning he held Hermann’s hand over the table? Hermann was wasting his own time. What it must’ve cost him not to recoil back from the contamination in his touch. Newt was toxic chemicals all the way down. 

“Fine,” Hermann said. He didn’t stand up, but his eyes tracked Newt warily through Newt’s restless circuit of the room. His lips were pressed together, tugging down at the corner, and Newt hated getting that look on him these days. “It’s not always going to be easy and I know it. But I want to do this for you.”

“Anyone else can!” Newt said, leaning forward over the table, and hitting it lightly. It made his fist hurt so he stopped. “Just – just find me a good professional, and – and visit, it doesn’t need to be you doing this, _why are you doing this_?”

Hermann stood up and grabbed his tie. The table was still between them, so Newt got dragged forward, a bit, by his throat, Hermann glaring at him. “I love you,” Hermann snapped. “You self-destructive garbage fire of a man!”

Newt blinked at him. Hermann released his tie, and stepped back slowly, and settled back down, as though he hadn’t done that.

“Did you just call me garbage?” Newt said. His voice came out in a squeak. He was trying not to think too hard about being manhandled by Hermann, because wow.

“Yes,” Hermann said, folding his hands primly. “I may have called you garbage.”

Newt found himself grinning at him, huge and loopy with relief. He lunged forward, wanting to sprawl in his lap. That wouldn’t work right, though, he knew that, so he stopped halfway and grabbed his chair and tugged it closer, settling down so they were next to each other. “Oh, Herms,” he said, and pivoted his hips, lying his legs carefully over Hermann’s. “I knew you cared.”

Hermann moved Newt’s legs to a more comfortable position, then left his hand there, just resting on Newt’s knee. “Don’t call me that,” he said wearily.

But he didn’t shove him off. He even stroked his knee, idly. Newt’s face was warm. “Don’t call me _Newton_ ,” he shot back.

“Deal,” Hermann said, so quickly that Newt blinked, and Hermann gave him a crooked smile. He patted Newt’s foot bracingly.

Newt leaned slowly into him, glacial timescale, continental shift. Hermann shifted, made space for him, until they were both comfortable. He put an arm around his shoulder, coughing a little as he did it as if to hide the motion. Newt snuggled in closer and grinned disbelievingly into his jacket. What a _sap_. 

“Do you believe now that I want to do this,” Hermann said.

His feelings seemed real definitely. Which, wow, Newt was not going to chase down the rabbit hole of how long they could have been doing this for, because there was no point in pursuing a course that had no other outcome but hurting. “I don’t know,” he said, and Hermann heaved a sigh, actually heaved it, Newt could feel his lungs move. Newt shifted back and poked at his chest accusingly. After that he just kind of left his hand there, which was, well, it was nice. “Your rationality will win out again eventually, it always does,” Newt said quietly. “This really isn’t a good idea. I’m a bad idea, right now, I’m—”

“Newt—”

Newt shook his head, frantically, breath starting to come fast. “No, I—” 

Hermann placed the palm of his hand firmly over his mouth. Newt blinked at him.

“I love you like you love kaiju,” Hermann said.

Newt’s mouth gaped open.

After a moment, Hermann removed his hand. His eyes were anywhere but Newt, his neck red. 

“Oh,” Newt said slowly after a while. Hermann made a kind of grnmph noise and looked away. Newt slid his legs free of Hermann and sat up straight. He felt about like how Threefold must have felt, when the building fell on it. “Well. I. I promise I’m not going to try to … make you destroy the world?”

It felt like lying. It was. He would. 

“You won’t succeed, anyway,” Hermann said, which was just insulting. Hermann held out his hand, but Newt turned away, shaking his head. His eyes felt red and prickly.

Hermann sighed and laid his hand on his lap. “What else?” he said. “Just so you know, while I’m happy to help, I am taking note of the amount of time spent each day in endlessly reassuring you of obvious facts, and in a few years I will ask for the time back with interest.”

Another two or three buildings fell on Newt then. _In a few years_.

He opened his mouth and closed it. “I’m kind of pissed off at you,” he said, because it was the first thing that came to mind, but perfectly true.

Hermann shifted his seat back just a fraction away from Newt’s. His eyebrows rose in disdain. “I beg your pardon.”

“Not me, but me, I mean, us,” Newt said. “I wanted – like I know you’re saving me, saved me, I’m grateful, really I am, and I love you so damn much I just want to kiss you half the day and then spend the rest of the day reading about invertebrates and then kissing you some more, but I’m pissed, I am, I’m furious, you took me out of there. You cut me off from them! I didn’t want to be cut off from them! It was part of me!” His eyes prickled with the threat of tears. He fought them off, not because he didn’t want Hermann to see him cry but because Hermann was very weak to his tears. He flailed an arm. “So yeah, a part of me wishes you’d – joined me—” He said it really fast, rushing past it, because he was mostly aware of his thoughts these days, and didn’t actually like sounding like a supervillain. “Or let me do my thing, yeah, I know you saved me but sometimes I wish you hadn’t!”

“I wasn’t about to leave you staked out for the eagles,” Hermann snapped.

Newt lifted his hand ready to gesture, then lowered it, derailed. “Uh … so you think I’m, what is that, Prometheus?”

Hermann folded his handkerchief irritably into a ball, then unfolded it. “You stole forbidden knowledge from otherworldly creatures, to better mankind, and were punished.” He smoothed his handkerchief out. “It fits,” he said, huffily, when Newt stared at him.

“Wow, man.”

He pushed back in his chair, then leaned it back on two legs, balancing, not looking at Hermann who watched him blatantly in irritation and slight concern and something else.

He couldn’t keep questioning the fact of Hermann’s feelings, because Hermann would argue him down for hours, he always did. It was more just whether he deserved to be gifted with them. 

“Newton …” Hermann said. Newt thumped the chair back down. “To what extent are you able to tell … That is to say. Can you tell which of your impulses are you, and which are them?”

That question was easy in a way Newt wished it wasn’t. “Nope,” he said. He tried to grin, but it came out strained. “Not in blind hell.”

Hermann unhooked his glasses and rubbed hard at his forehead. Newt twitched: the basic pain meds were in the kitchen cabinet, the others in the bathroom, and he was ready to fetch either. “It’s good I’m going to keep an eye on you,” Hermann said.

He looked so achingly tired. Newt shuffled tentatively forward, and poked at Hermann’s shoulder, then lifted his chin up so Hermann looked at him. “Pretty sure I know which me wants to kiss you,” he said.

Hermann met his eyes, then twitched a small smile. “That’s a start, isn’t it?”

Newt grinned at him in relief, and punched his shoulder, then shifted back.

After a moment Hermann coughed. “By all means tell me more,” he said.

“More?” Newt said blankly.

“About …” Hermann said and harrumphed. 

Newt really would not have credited himself with being this slow, but he really wasn’t used to living in a world where Hermann wanted to make out with him _too_. “Oh, how much I want to kiss you?” he exclaimed. He leaned forward. “Oh, Herms. Hermann. So much!”

“Words are all well and good,” Hermann said, his eyes glinting, “but I have little respect for a theory until the proof has been conclusively confirmed—”

Newt did that.

He got to kiss Hermann, and sleep curled up next to him, and argue with him again, and things were good. Things were mostly good. When they were bad they weren’t too bad, as long as his eyes were open.

 

 

 

Nightmares dug claws into Newt, trying to dig him out of safe shelter, but most nights he got grounded in time by the quiet breathing of Hermann next to him. The dreams where he dug through cities and scraped out survivors with long and lashing claws were worse.

Sometimes he was fine, but today he could only drag himself out of bed long after Hermann’s warmth had faded from it. A migraine pricked at his eyes, images sharp like needles. No, actually, Newt knew needles, this was worse. 

The scans all agreed, and Hermann insisted, that there was no longer an active connection between him and the Precursors. And Newt’s experiences corroborated that: they didn’t talk in his head so much, or drive his body around, Newt was pretty sure. The thoughts and memories and urges he did have were distant and repetitive, ghosts of drift. Vestigial echoes. Not a sign of anything lying under his own shallower consciousness, and stirring occasionally closer to waking. Hermann insisted. 

But he rose and felt like too small a piece of himself. Felt entirely too big, adrift and spinning in oceans. A low roar washed at the back of his mind.

_You are not enough. You are too much. He will leave, one day, and you will belong to them and you will not be strong enough to fight it._

_You are us and we are you._

He stood in the bathroom as the shower ran, as the room filled up with steam, until the mirror fogged up and it was just him in here. No mirror images. He tilted his arms, frowning at his tattoos. He’d chosen them back when the only way to get kaiju out of his head was to get them onto his skin.

“You’re skin deep,” he told the kaiju that crawled over his arms and chest, nearly seeming to shift when he blinked his eyes. “Just pigment. It’s all me under there. You’re my threat display, not a threat to me!”

Hermann’s shout was muffled through the door. “Newt, if you must rant to yourself in the shower, don’t use up all the hot water!”

“You are such an old man,” Newt hollered back at him. He stepped into the shower quickly. Hermann needed that hot water.  


And at night he clung to him and raged right back at the whispers in his head, quieter but still there. _Shut up. You were wrong. You won’t win. You’ll never win, not while we’re here. Not while we’re together._

__

__

_Not today, destructive thoughts. Not today and not tomorrow._

He felt Hermann’s arm too tight around him, his warmth. Tangible proof that it was worthwhile, still, to be human. 

 

 

 

Newt came bouncing up to his shoulder as Hermann worked. It was his usual type of energy, nothing disconcerting, so Hermann didn’t bother to look up from his papers yet.

“Hey,” Newt said, and leaned over his shoulder, peering down. Hermann didn’t push the papers out of his sight: no point, when they lived in such close proximity. “Ooh, nice flight plan.” He slid a cup of tea towards Hermann, then nudged it gently against Hermann’s hand, once, twice, until Hermann rolled his eyes and took it. He leaned back to take his first sip.

Newt leaned his hip against the counter. Hermann always vaguely suspected he jutted his hips out more than necessary when he did that, but he hadn’t yet found a way to ask him about it that wouldn’t just embarrass himself. “Five minute boyfriend break to talk about mollusks?” Newt said, and batted his eyelashes. Only Newt. He waved his hand. “Doctor Patel finally put out her new paper – you know we’ve been corresponding, and I was psyched for this one.”

Hermann sipped his tea, relaxing against his chair. “Should I worry you’ll replace me?” 

“No one could ever replace you, you giant cranky pile of sweaters,” Newt said. He was annoyed at Hermann from the Coffeepot Incident. Hermann maintained that if Newt wanted a fish bowl, he should’ve just asked. Newt patted his shoulder and shuffled out papers, enthused. “But this is fascinating stuff, man, listen. _Observations on the morphological changes to specimens of the Peltospiridae, with reference to trace metallic elements_ …”

His voice calmed a little when he read aloud, passion still shining through it, but lacking the vibrant valleys and hills he pitched and climbed to when he spoke from his own mind. Hermann liked both his ways of talking. 

It was good, that he could find passion in this, focus in on small organisms at the edge of very large events. Newt was not allowed to study anything bigger than a sea urchin on pain of death; to his temper, to extract this promise Herman was no longer allowed to work until what Newt had melodramatically referred to as ‘the point of collapse’, which was more accurately merely exhaustion. Like proper compromise, neither of them were quite happy about it.

“—in the shells, man, even completely unrelated subspecies, which has literally never been observed before and how amazing is that?” Newt was evidently finished, by how he was beaming, so Hermann straightened and smiled back at him. “That’s what life does, man, it adapts.”

“Fascinating,” Hermann said. It was, but he was in severe danger of distraction: he now knew by experience that Newt’s nose was extremely kissable, and Newt was right there, his nose in easy kissing range, and then they would be here all day. Which was not unpleasant, but he had work to do.

Newt tossed his papers back over his shoulder and looked at him fondly. “You’re my favorite thing,” he said. 

“Ah.” Declarations of emotion still flustered him, even though he had initiated and urged for free communication. Hermann looked at his papers, adjusted his glasses. He coughed. “You. Are mine as well.”

“Gastropods come in close though,” Newt said, and patted his shoulder, hand lingering warmly, before he all but ran back over to his side of the lab.

The tea was cold when Hermann remembered to turn back to it, but it had helped anyway, and he tackled his work with renewed energy. The flight plan needed to be perfect. Space travel was shuffled to a distant second priority the moment Trespasser attacked, and now it needed to be dragged back to the sharpest edge of science. Hermann’s mind had been pitted against theoretical impossibilities and staggering death counts, he had modelled the breach and predicted kaiju, and he was ready for this. 

His eyes started to hurt, which was troubling, but not too bad yet, he judged. He pushed past it for now.

A touch on his shoulder. Hermann started upright, becoming newly aware of the slow ache in his back and sharp ache of his leg. Newt flopped down in a chair near him, backwards, arms draped over the chairback. 

Newt gave him a smile. “You probably want to eat soon,” he said. “It has to be before midnight to count as dinner. Says you.”

“Ah …” A glance at the clock confirmed how much time had passaged. A glance at his work showed how much he had accomplished by it, which was reassuring. “I’m nearly done.” He really should eat, if only so Newton remembered to. Their food was not better than PPDC fare, largely because Newt could only mostly manage food straight from a can, not what little fresh food was available. He got distracted by variables, talked of the teeming multiplication of bacteria with nausea instead of fascination.

There was silence for a second, which was not too long a time, but it was Newt. Hermann looked up and frowned at him, and Newt sent him a bracing smile that was not quite right.

“Newt,” Hermann said, and waited.

Newt shook his head. At least he had ceased dissembling. “There you go, saving the world,” he said, with a wave at Hermann’s work. “And I’m just … I’m meant to be brilliant, and I mean, I am, I’m brilliant and prodigious and all the rest – precocial, I want to say precocial – so why can’t I—”

He had not gone too far yet, but his voice rose with recognizable panic. Hermann took his hand, which often helped to do at least the initial work of steadying him, and Newt stopped for a moment, swallowing.

“Newton. Leaving aside your very respectable body of work,” which on its own would be enough to ensure him a place in the history books for at least the next century, and, Hermann privately thought, deservedly for millennia, “—you came back. You looked into the very mouth of madness, and you came back to me. You did what quite literally no human has ever done before and lived.”

He met Newt’s eyes unflinchingly, and Newt glanced away, then drew in a big, deep breath, chest puffing up, and looked back at him. “Rockstar,” Newt said.

“Yes,” Hermann said. Newt kissed his hand enthusiastically then dropped it. Hermann tried, he did, but the urgency was rising again in his stomach and blood, and he could only fight it for so long. He said slightly testily, “Now please let me finish this paper at least, or they’ll think me unreliable—”

“Oh, _Herms_ , you always gotta ruin our sentimental—”

“I distinctly remember that I am not the one who once panicked while talking about feelings and threw half a spleen at his partner—”

And it was familiar and it was them and they were home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Acknowledgments!
> 
> The response to this has been so overwhelming in the best possible way, I have every comment emblazoned on my heart basically. Thank you all so much for making writing this even more of a blast than it already was.
> 
> Special thanks to the dear friend who saw Pac Rim 2 with me in the theatre, because they had to put up with me clinging urgently to their arm on occasion; they have been right there any time I needed to rant excitedly about these characters and universe and I am so, so grateful and delighted to have shared this with them. Thanks are due to them, also, for orbital motion. 
> 
> (I know I stole Hermann being very gay for Isaac Newton as well as regular Newton from a specific fic, but can't remember it, and will name it here if I do.) 
> 
> This community is a wonder, so full of fic and meta and art and playlists already, and I've reconnected with old friends because of it. Y'all are rockstars. Go forward with hope.


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